Entry 11: Trust Over Policing in Academic Integrity

Date: June 15, 2025

Quotation: “Inquiry about cheating begins with ‘Did the student do the work?’ Inquiry about integrity begins with ‘Does this work accurately represent the student’s skills and understandings?’”
Reference:
Stigter, J. (2025, May 30). Catch them Learning: A Pathway to Academic Integrity in the Age of AI [Blog post]. Cult of Pedagogy. https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/ai-integrity/ cultofpedagogy.com

Why I Included This:

While reading this article, I was struck by how much the conversation around cheating has shifted. The question isn’t just “did the student cheat?” It’s “what does this work actually show us about their thinking?” That shift feels subtle but important. It challenges the way I’ve sometimes approached assessment focusing on completion, formatting, and correctness, instead of deeper signs of understanding.

In the age of generative AI, I know I will need to be more thoughtful about how I define originality. It’s not just about whether a sentence came from ChatGPT. It’s about whether students are developing the ability to make choices, support ideas, and explain how they got there. If integrity is only measured by whether work was done “unaided,” then we’re missing an opportunity to help students engage ethically with the digital tools that are part of their world.

This article reminded me of something I noticed in our Module 3 discussions. Many of us are worried about AI in education, but not all for the same reasons. For me, the concern isn’t just that students might cheat it’s that we might create assessments so disconnected from real learning that cheating becomes a rational response.

Looking ahead, I want to shift how I think about integrity. I want to design tasks that give students opportunities to reflect on their process, to identify their influences, and to explain how they arrived at an idea. That kind of work makes thinking visible and that’s the kind of integrity I want to foster.