I delivered the opening keynote for Plagiarism Across Europe and Beyond 2020. The conference was moved online creating an interesting dynamic, but worked very well in the circumstances.
In my presentation, I looked back at the 20 years I’d been working in academic integrity, starting off trying to use technology to detect plagiarism, moving through the current changing situation with Covid-19, finishing by considering the challenges likely to face the sector in the future.
You can see the slides I used below (and also ).
The talk was wide ranging, paying credit to many of the researchers who have laid the foundation to contract cheating research and showing how many of the issues we’re looking at now are the same ones we were talking about over a decade ago.
At this time when we’ve moved a lot of assessment online, how will we ensure continued academic integrity and how will we address the contract cheating industry aggressively marketing to vulnerable students? How will we react when students struggle with extortion and blackmail demands? The issues are very real and the threats posed by Artificial Intelligence will only see continued challenges for academic integrity in the future.