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Episode 8: Academic integrity
72 Plays7 days ago
Episode 8 of Talking Transformation features Kane Murdoch, Head of Complaints, Appeals and Misconduct at Macquarie University, Sydney. They discuss academic integrity in higher education, moving beyond reactive approaches to student misconduct towards data-driven, proactive strategies.
Kane emphasises that academic integrity isn't solely a student issue but relates fundamentally to assessment security and academic design. He challenges the traditional focus on punishment, arguing academics should mark AI-generated work on its merits rather than seeking additional penalties.
The conversation also explores systemic challenges: outdated policies designed for smaller universities, excessive appeals processes, and the need for better integration between academic and professional services staff.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Talking Transformation' and Guest Kane Murdoch
00:00:13
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Talking Transformation, the podcast about all things higher education. I'm your host, Charles Knight, and this week is going to be slightly different in that normally, as the host, I kind of pose questions to the guests and don't is to draw them out in conversation. This will be a bit more conversational this week, and you might find ah slightly more philosophical, because I'm really pleased this week to be joined by Kane Murdoch, who I'll introduce properly in a moment, so that we can talk all things academic integrity. We will talk a little bit, I guess, about AI, assessment redesign, a whole range of things.
Authenticity in Academic Integrity Experts
00:00:53
Speaker
And the reason I wanted Kane on the show
00:00:55
Speaker
Let's start with a bit of controversy. Even if we are going to talk about AI in higher education at the moment, there's so many people presenting themselves suddenly as academic integrity experts and they know this, that and the other about AI. And you just have to be really, really careful in my experience. there's lots of people repositioning themselves. But Cain is the real deal. So.
00:01:18
Speaker
Welcome, Cain Murdoch.
Kane Murdoch's Role at Macquarie University
00:01:21
Speaker
Would you like to introduce yourself in terms of your role and where you currently at? ah Thanks, Charles. Thanks for the invite. um So, formally, my title is Head of Complaints, Appeals and Misconduct at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.
00:01:37
Speaker
um I suppose...
Proactive vs. Reactive Misconduct Approaches
00:01:40
Speaker
Like you call me the real deal. i think it's just because I've been at it longer than most. um I've spent the last decade this effectively just focusing on, you know, what is known in the gig as serious misconduct. But most of that has kind of been various types of cheating. Just when you actively look for it rather than waiting for it.
00:02:05
Speaker
it starts to tell you things about what's actually happening rather than oh no we've got a lot of naughty students and um this seems to have come as a surprise to many that it wasn't just a naughty student problem um like obviously when you start to think about how broadly these things might be, its it starts to very much change your view about how well we do outside of the deal in higher education.
00:02:35
Speaker
Yeah. And I just, I really like the way you frame that as well, because you're talking about the fact being proactive rather than waiting for cases. So when I worked in institutions, I was involved from an academic perspective. i was an associate dean. and I'd be involved in academic misconduct, appeal, and so on and so on. But really, if you looked at a lot of my activities, it was purely reactive, i.e. this thing had happened, and therefore I'm going to react to it, and also in a really isolated way. So here's student X.
00:03:04
Speaker
We'll deal with student X. But does that indicate a pattern of behavior of odd things we're seeing? It was very reactive. And you made me think about it. So here in the UK, the fire service did this thing where they transitioned from just going out when buildings were on fire to say, OK, how do we educate people?
Preventive Strategies in Academic Misconduct
00:03:22
Speaker
What are the ways that we can kind of upskill the population to know not to burn down their houses, basically? and that prevent Well, yeah, that bit of prevention makes a massive difference downstream.
00:03:33
Speaker
um because we'll come on to this a bit later because really and as you say you've been at this long time a lot and i'm not going to name any universities but if you look at especially in england if you look a lot of academic academic integrity systems but also academic appeals and so on they're all kind of designed to be blunt in a completely different age some of them still to me read a little bit like it's going to be two gentlemen get together to, you know, they're not really, a lot of them have never in my mind made that shift to kind of where we are in 2025, 26, in terms of who students are, how students operate, but also just how big higher education is now.
00:04:18
Speaker
That's such a thing.
Challenges in Handling Appeals at Scale
00:04:21
Speaker
um as As I said, my job is complaints, appeals and misconduct. And we deal with... give or take 2000 appeals a year.
00:04:31
Speaker
yeah And it's always striking that people are surprised that that there's not a formal committee meeting for every single appeal. yeah I kind of go, look, do the maths on that.
00:04:44
Speaker
And you very quickly realise that we're not going to be able to do that. um Yeah, like yeah you have to live in the reality of now. And sometimes that includes a lot of different work. And sometimes that includes recognising, let's um hook back around to misconduct stuff.
00:05:04
Speaker
It takes recognising what's actually happening.
Assessment Security vs. Student Misconduct
00:05:06
Speaker
And you picked up on something there that I kind of twigged in my mind. There's been a lot of talk about academic integrity, but it's all been focused on students.
00:05:17
Speaker
Yeah. I.e., if only we train them or if only we talk to them about how to avoid doing the bad things. But there hasn't been much kind of it's interesting to me that an assessment is the the the home of academic integrity, like it yeah kind of in a sense doesn't exist outside of that.
00:05:37
Speaker
But academics haven't been taught about integrity and the different way to think about that is assessment security. You know, they've just relied on this hit and hope
Education Beyond Career Outcomes
00:05:47
Speaker
kind of approach. And unsurprisingly, it hasn't worked very well.
00:05:52
Speaker
No, I mean we'll come on to academic security, but I think there's something really interesting there as well, where you say it's kind of, it's all focused around the assessments of the MPs. And it to me, it relates to something that I've seen in the US, and I don't know what it's like in Australia, but does not exist in the UK, which is as follows. UK universities are often really nervous about about the ideas and say, well, here's the principles and values that one of our graduates will have.
00:06:19
Speaker
And I'm actually a really, I really like the idea of from the outset, you're saying to people, this is about education. It's about skills development. And yes, you're interested in your career, but it's also about who you are.
00:06:31
Speaker
And there's those kinds of conversations with students. And then on the other side of it, what you just said, I think is absolutely right. It's that hidden and hope thing.
Using Data to Understand Misconduct Patterns
00:06:39
Speaker
And you think I'm really interested and we will come on to AI later, but it's a bit bigger than that. Something you and I have talked about before, which I find really interesting.
00:06:47
Speaker
As I recall, the last time we properly spoke was in a pub in Manchester. Yeah, well, yeah. um um the nu Yeah, the nice thing about that. But the thing I've always taken from your approach, which really appeals to me, is when I talk to you about what you're doing and the approaches and the principles, you're data-driven.
00:07:05
Speaker
So a lot of the things that we've talked about previously, you and I, in pubs in Manchester and other places, is is what's the data telling me? And I've always found it really interesting because Everyone's got an anecdote about I was in this appeal or this malpractice.
00:07:23
Speaker
But you're really, from my experience, really focused around what's the data telling us. So if we look across a pattern of time, if we look across a body of students, what do we get from the data? And I don't honestly still see much of that approach. The approach I still see in lots of institutions is literally this is the number of cases we've got or we've had. And this is how quickly we process them. which just tells you about the process. It doesn't tell you anything in appeals terms, academic context terms, mate. Like, what's actually going on? What does this tell us about ourselves? Yeah. Ourselves, including students, including every part of... Yeah.
00:08:01
Speaker
I will note that there's a couple of universities in Australia, um University of Southern Queensland and, I believe, Central Queensland Uni, who have also taken this kind of approach.
AI's Impact on Traditional Assessment Structures
00:08:14
Speaker
um But yeah, absolutely. Like when I started doing this work, I ah had some facility with Moodle, which is kind of the genesis of it. And so I understood that Moodle is effectively just a website and it takes logs. Like it understands where you connected from, it understands how long you spent, it understands what you clicked on.
00:08:38
Speaker
And you could actually see activity in that data. You could enrich that data. and What it's shown us really is that the kind of old idea of the SA mill Like, ironically, in AI terms, I think the essay mill is kind of dead yeah because why it's only literally if you cannot interpret the output at all that it's useful. But what we started to see is whole units and up to, you know, huge swathes of entire degrees being taken by third parties, which is a completely different thing.
00:09:19
Speaker
yeah it's It's not even comparable as a service, really, to the old hand over a question, hand over your PayPal and get a file back. It's a totally different thing, and but it's so much more visible than any given single assignment ever was.
00:09:36
Speaker
um And so what that told us is that the structure, the the course level, you know, subject, module, whatever your terminology, this the structure of assessment was actually broken because it yeah could be just so easily bypassed. There was no security.
00:09:57
Speaker
We couldn't assure anything. And so it starts to frame your views. It's like having, oh I've got this brick wall behind me that I can't go through and so I need to worry about the other three sides.
00:10:10
Speaker
Yeah. and And it's really funny, isn't it Because, again, i don't want to get too much into AI too soon, but the the contract cheating, the assessment mills are really interesting to me because they're effectively, interestingly, the kind of surface that is disrupted by AI. And we might say that's great, they're disrupted by AI, but...
00:10:29
Speaker
You're absolutely right that um you you just can't get that from individual students. The kind of data that you get from places like Moodle really do enable you to start to see um some of the patterns.
AI Tools vs. Essay Mills
00:10:43
Speaker
and And I think the other thing that I think is really interesting is um
00:10:51
Speaker
you start to then get a sense of you know, how are different student groups influenced by their interactions with these kinds of groups? Because we won't go into too much detail, but one of the things with the, as you know, with the essay mills is they would often blackmail students and say, you paid, but now you're going to pay again, you know? And I've literally had students turn their laptop around yeah across a desk and show me that email. Yeah.
00:11:19
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. and And sometimes we forget as well that part the challenge for the students is not just about integrity. It's about that they've become involved in criminality. And that is really, really challenging for them. I think the thing I wanted to ask you about, you kind of alluded to it, you've obviously, just like fashion trends, I guess, you see the kind of things come and go. And you kind of alluded to there that, in your view, the kind of essay mill has died down a bit because...
00:11:47
Speaker
how do you compete with a lot of AI tools where the barrier to entry and the cost is next to zero? yeah And I would imagine the appeal for some students is, who knows but me and the AI? do you know what mean? there's no There's a kind of irony there that like you know in the age, like especially in Australia, where...
00:12:05
Speaker
moving towards a kind of two lanes like open yeah assessments and invigilated, se secure us or more secure assessments. um The irony there is that a student could use ai perfectly within policy, but if they went and used an essay mill, they would be breaching the policy, but they're effectively the exact same thing.
00:12:27
Speaker
Yeah. You know, yeah it's there's a kind of nonsense around a lot of this And I think we need to drag it back to learning rather than production of assets.
Institutional Responses to AI Threats
00:12:37
Speaker
yeah yeah You have to start from learning. It kind of leads me on to the next thing want to talk about, which is just talking a bit more directly about AI.
00:12:44
Speaker
There is a lot of nonsense, I think, that's been introduced in the system as ah as a response to AI. And the one that I love talking to people about is loads of institutions introduce both Australia, here in the UK, various places, policy say you can't use AI tools, right? And you and i talked about this. At the same time, they say, and by the way, as a student at this university, you get Microsoft 365 for free, which got AI built into it.
00:13:07
Speaker
Some institutions know it's like you get Grammarly for free to support you with your writing. And you're in this weird space then where saying students, you can't use tools for There you go.
00:13:19
Speaker
Here's some free tools. But it to me, it was part of um if your memory stretches back that far, when everybody got really panicky about AI, instead of kind of taking a first principles approach and saying, what want do from a learning perspective? I think there was a lot of, if I'm brutally honest, a lot of damage done with people just generating really knee jerk policy that didn't really deal with the fundamental issue, but was you talk about assessment security, which is right. To me, a lot of this was assessment security theater.
00:13:55
Speaker
It was 100% we're doing something. Yeah, like the instabans, you know, which you kind of allude to there that, oh, we're going to jam this into policy. Normally this takes 18 months, but we got it through in 18 hours. You know, we're going to totally ban ai and we're going to jump on board, you know, AI detectors. And it's almost like universities across, certainly about the Western world, I can at least discuss, um,
00:14:25
Speaker
that they've spent so long kind of telling themselves that assessment's all fine and we're not graduating students who haven't earned the the award and where the truth is that's not true 100%.
00:14:41
Speaker
it's I'm not sure what the percentage is, but it's significantly lower than 100. And so having these kind of protectionist type of approaches where you're immediately going,
00:14:54
Speaker
We just need to worry about what people think about us rather than thinking about us and what we're doing. That was basically the thing. and so It's almost like a PR exercise rather than a this is potentially an existential threat and we should actually look at it seriously rather than looking at it as an in a knee-jerk way.
Redesigning Assessments for Learning Experience
00:15:16
Speaker
Yeah. and And again, you and I talked about this before, but I think it's useful to kind of bring out the other challenge with all of this for me. And this is this is my view. It's not an organisational view is obviously universities. My views are all my own, Charles. yes Yeah. Yeah. The underlying business models. Right.
00:15:34
Speaker
And you the the written assessment for a whole range of reasons. is a really easy to administer, to audit, to parcel to students, for students to send back vi via VLE.
00:15:48
Speaker
So for a university, it works perfectly because you can you can deal with really large volumes of this. yeah And one of the conversations I'm having with people is this really uncomfortable trade-off, which is um if you start to move more and more your provision away from written essays or at least takeaways, takeaway essays, you write, even if it's for the benefit, you start to add more complexity into the system and you add more cost into the system because... Kind of in some ways, like I'm not... I've started to... Well, I've been thinking about this for a fair while.
00:16:22
Speaker
Like I don't... like the sheer amount of assessment that has ah been occurring, let's just say the last yeah half to full decade, um like some subjects might have, you a dozen of small assessments, right? yeah've We've moved away from the large scale, know, high impact, high stakes assessments in a number of, there's been a number of positive aims behind that. Mm-hmm.
00:16:52
Speaker
However, the further and further you go like to reduce that thing, it's like you're moving like one lever, but all of a sudden this lever over here is flying around and that lever over there is the amount of assurance you can, and or confidence yeah you can have that the students have done the work, what we call the work of learning.
00:17:16
Speaker
And l Problem is, like I think trying to replicate part of the the problem that I see in the last three years is and the part of those reactions that you talked about is we need to redesign assessment.
00:17:33
Speaker
And I think if everyone just stopped for a minute and just started just really super basic, who is we What is the assessment? what What are you referring to when you talk about assessment? And what are you referring to when you talk about redesign? Now, I don't think I've heard this for a decade with regard to contract cheating.
00:17:56
Speaker
People saying, oh, we just need to do this and that will fix the problem. And an example of that is scaffolding. People went, okay, what I'll do is ask students to submit their drafts.
00:18:08
Speaker
And then i can have a i can have confidence in the end product. But when I see emails back and forth between students and the contractors writing those drafts yeah and polishing them up towards the final product, you go, oh, right, that didn't work at all.
00:18:27
Speaker
The idea that you could design out these problems at ah at a course convener or a module convener level is just a nonsense that we told ourselves. And so you so I start to think about it and you you talked about cost and I kind of, yeah, okay. So if you have to secure everything, you'll bankrupt yourself, right? yeah It'll drive students completely mental. It'll be just awful for every single person involved.
00:18:56
Speaker
And so I start to kind of go, okay, so what do we, like you start to just take one step at a time and start to think, okay, so if we reduce the total load of assessment, Okay, what then?
00:19:10
Speaker
i and then I start to go can you secure a module? yeah And that's where it like the cost shoots back up if you're trying to secure one module alone with yeah one unit can module convener and a handful of staff.
00:19:26
Speaker
So and on and on and on. But my point is that we need to rethink the overall structure yeah of award integrity rather than trying to adjust this the fine grade settings that like this essay or that module, none of that will work.
00:19:44
Speaker
I've been thinking about this a lot. I did a panel last week at University College London, which was about AI and the impact on employability. And it really, I don't know why it kicked off my head. I don't think like you, I'm not sure we've zoomed out enough. So exactly and I don't think we've zoomed out enough. And sometimes it's to do with the funding regimes of fun courses.
00:20:02
Speaker
Like, I've never had a conversation with anybody, as far as I can remember, where the starting point is, do you know what, actually, in the current age, 25, 26, is a modular structure the right one?
00:20:16
Speaker
Should we try something different than a modular structure? Now, I'm not saying that's the answer, by the way. It's just an example of, even when we're trying to do this stuff, as you've just said, we're kind of stuck within certain paradigms. And it's really hard to do the first principle thing. And the first principle thing for me, if you want to take it really kind of fundamentally to say, and I've never seen anyone do this. I love when people say, okay, if we were doing a degree,
00:20:42
Speaker
we've designed a degree from scratch to be fit for purpose. Ignore how we've designed anything for what would it look like? They always still end up squished into this. Here's the modules and here's the bits. Yeah.
00:20:53
Speaker
Cause you can't get out of the box. People can't seem to get out of the box.
Innovative Assessment Methods and Student Agency
00:20:58
Speaker
Like for example, if you, if you thought about, We have, and and I think I've written about this kind of thing.
00:21:05
Speaker
i write a blog just to get these mad things out of my head. um But I've talked about, I think, know, how kind of... clasped um assessment and learning are.
00:21:20
Speaker
Like, in other words, we kind of here, students do some learning, but we're going to assess it in four weeks. And it's this, I think of maybe, maybe I'm confusing posts, but I kind of think of mine. We talked about it as a double helix and they're kind of wrapping around each other.
00:21:35
Speaker
And, One of the things that I've started to think about is why do we inherently combine the two? So once you separate the two, once you don't necessarily assess at a modular level at all, remember, we're trying to think about how do we financially make this work while also, you know,
00:22:02
Speaker
um keeping hold of some of these valid levers like assurance of learning and so for example if students had to do learning and learning activities they're not just you know um pliant vessels with knowledge being poured in they have to do active things and they get feedback and they start to understand how their thinking and their learning and their doing is developing but what if
00:22:32
Speaker
We had assessments as more like stage gates rather than this constant pitter patter. What if they could choose when they took the skirt stage gate? they like If anyone's ever been on Reddit and seen at their own uni and seen the way students talk about, and this is genuine, this is them talking to themselves.
00:22:56
Speaker
about the level of stress and the worry and the anxiety and they go, I'm not ready. And then this feeds a whole bunch of other negative choices. But what if they got to choose when they they go, i am ready.
00:23:09
Speaker
And then they got to take, they got to attempt. What if we started to think about that much lighter, but more concerned and secure assessment load as separate from the learning?
00:23:25
Speaker
Give more agency to students rather than dictating that every single student must learn the same stuff in 12 weeks, which is kind of, when you think about that, that is nonsensical.
00:23:39
Speaker
Yeah. that That makes no sense. No, because you're you're almost there and you're heading towards kind of, it becomes, which is a dirty word I know for some but it becomes more like an apprenticeship in the sense of you develop the skills. Yeah.
00:23:52
Speaker
A mastery is about, as you say, you've got those stage gates. And this is the first time I've ever done this on the podcast. But like you, actually, if if you're listening to this and you've never been on Reddit, it's really worth looking at...
00:24:06
Speaker
um the Reddit community for your university and what students are talking about, because Kane's absolutely right. You see all sorts of interesting and slightly worrying things on there. And then go and have a look at whatever the Ask academia community is for um your country. And you'll get the same from an academic perspective.
00:24:24
Speaker
And you're absolutely right. The stuff you see in there. Ask slash professors. Yeah, it's very interesting. Like just reading the way people are thinking about things.
00:24:35
Speaker
Well worth look. Yeah, yeah. and and But you're absolutely right. And it and it but it then becomes, as you've said, it doesn't become about the
Human-Centric Education and Enjoyable Learning
00:24:43
Speaker
learning. It becomes about the and process and that I've got to get these students to this point by this day. And it it just becomes a really mechanicalistic process, which frankly isn't a lot of fun either. i mean, it's okay. I don't think anyone's enjoying that or really getting the sense that...
00:25:04
Speaker
um the the more mechanical it becomes i think the let the more we lose that sense of humans developing and especially young humans like I went back to uni as a mature age student after thinking about life for a number of years and so I kind of knew exactly what I was doing and why I was there but an 18 year old who comes out of high school they're forming their their personality is forming and to just kind of grind them into the wheels seems a terrible loss of opportunity to me. Yeah.
00:25:37
Speaker
Yeah. um Sorry, that got a bit dark for a moment. No, it did. It did. but no like and But you made me think, because and just just going on to this this sense of joy and for stuff as well, one of my absolute favourite things I used to teach with an old colleague mine, John Mercer,
00:25:51
Speaker
who it was an accountancy course and the students used to have do client consultations and they were done face to face over the table. They'd be given some information about the client. And this sounds really weird. Now I describe it. I used to be a little old lady who husband had died and I had a factory.
00:26:08
Speaker
And what was I going to do with this factory and all of the assets and stuff. And I would ask the students really random questions because I didn't know anything about finance as an old lady. And, um, It was actually a really joyful thing to do. And the students in the moment were quite stressed about it. But when you did the debrief with them, you know, they said, actually, it's a pretty exhilarating thing to do. And their sense of confidence because they've done stuff.
00:26:30
Speaker
And I just it always makes me think you can do things with rigor. You can do things with integrity and security, but they don't always have to be miserable. Sometimes things are theyre to be miserable. and i sometimes To me, that's where design comes in. Yeah. Like people have attempted to design in elements that they're fundamentally incapable of. It's like trying to build ah an actual bridge with spaghetti.
00:26:53
Speaker
Yeah. can't do it. But those types of things, like how do you make this more human? How do you make, you know, students enjoy it? How do you challenge them? Yeah.
00:27:04
Speaker
How do you genuinely stretch them? How do you take them out of their comfort zone? All of those are ah valid questions. You you can build that with spaghetti perfectly.
00:27:16
Speaker
Yeah. But you can't build in, you know, the iron work, if you will. And I'm not saying that one's weak and one's not. I'm saying they're different materials. But yeah, like you can't build that in with spaghetti. Yeah.
00:27:29
Speaker
No. and and And just kind of move towards the kind of back end of this, um the other thing we kind of touched upon at the start, and I just wanted to bring up, is this question of workforce impact, because you talked about you know This is not not just about assessment and
Shared Responsibility in Preventing Misconduct
00:27:46
Speaker
it's not just about academics. and I'm talking about the whole range here, the kind of integrity piece, but also the kind of the kind of practices that lead students to make appeals that actually, in a well-designed system, let's be blunt about it, they would never get to it. You know what i mean? You'd iron out those things.
00:28:00
Speaker
So this to me is a about distributed responsibility. It's a responsibility of all of us. in an institutional context to at least have enough understanding of the kind of things that may lead students into the appeals process may impact academic security and integrity so that we all contribute to the whole. And, um,
00:28:25
Speaker
I think we just got to get away from that kind of thing of, oh, well, my part starts if something goes wrong and I reach for the regulations to find out the thing that I should do And we need more people to, um i guess, be active on in in these areas earlier on in the design, in how they're thinking about how they're communicating to students, how we communicate to each other as staff.
00:28:48
Speaker
the The whole idea that, you know, academic staff and professional staff have nothing to teach each other is kind of the key sin here in some ways. Like I've learned a hell of lot from academics, but they think some of them and and culturally it seems to be that it it only flows one way.
00:29:09
Speaker
And now... to their enormous credit, there's a lot of academics, and you came from an academic background, who have gone, know, I'm learning here from someone like me and other people like Sean Lehman, who I work with, and plenty of others. But I think that when we don't, like we talk about inclusivity for students, we're we're making everything inclusive. We don't make things inclusive for staff.
00:29:38
Speaker
Like I don't feel, except in kind of niche communities, yeah I don't feel included. I don't feel included by my institutions. I don't think that they really recognise the depth of skill and knowledge that is actually available there and hugely willing to add their two cents where it's where it's warranted and valid.
00:30:06
Speaker
We don't want to go stomping in over other people's areas, but ah at the same time, we don't appreciate others s stump stomping on ours. And I think when you when you kind of talked about kind of appeals and things like this. It's interesting to me, like I've had this come up recently where people kind of asking a very similar question.
Shift from Academic Judgment to Legalistic Appeals
00:30:27
Speaker
And one of the things that I think is that we have a kind of spectrum and academic judgment is at one end of it yeah and administrative law is at the other.
00:30:41
Speaker
yeah And we've moved so many things away from academic judgment that it therefore becomes appellable. We've kind of slid things over to that side rather than... So, in a sense, we haven't been confident because, you know, academic judgment has a certain amount of subjectivity, like, you know, in maths, one plus one equals two.
00:31:05
Speaker
But in history or, you know, philosophy or something like this, you know, it's it's a lot more subjective. But nonetheless...
00:31:17
Speaker
an academic saying one plus one equals two, it's no more valid than a historian saying this was a fail. Yeah. you know, part of our problem is that we, like even the thing, the difference between like a 63 and a 67, we've added an element of, we've by bringing in rubrics and saying that's that,
00:31:42
Speaker
We've actually kind of told students that this is all just arguable. And I'm not saying that academics should have carte blanche to go, more more word is law.
00:31:55
Speaker
But at the same time, they if they explain it to a student, they should be able to go, that's the judgment. Because look there's not a court in the land that will uphold a judgment against that academic.
00:32:07
Speaker
No. yeah know But we've actually moved it in a policy sense to go, no, no, this is all appellable and everything's just a moving face. And we kind of sentence ourselves to death by a thousand cuts by doing that.
00:32:21
Speaker
That's not really useful. I don't think it's a matter of fairness. Yeah. Like, sure, have have someone have a second look at it. But if a second academic goes, yeah, that's a fail, fail.
00:32:33
Speaker
know, that's the end of the road. And yeah yeah, the more we push into i couldnt um administrative law spaces, the more we end up being in difficult spaces, especially when there's academics driving the process, like, you know, academic integrity breaches is a classic example.
Evaluating AI-Generated Work on Merit
00:32:54
Speaker
People have asked me, what do you do when you can't breach people for AI? And I went, well, is the work any good? And then they'll always come to it's really generic and it's got false references and I go well mark that then.
00:33:09
Speaker
That's your space that stand by your academic judgment, you don't need to over punish a student if they works garbage just mark it on its merits. That should be pretty simple, but people are kind of desperate for the punishment phase.
00:33:23
Speaker
Yeah. And um I warned our listeners at the top, we might do a couple of wild tangents and you're goingnna send me off on wild tangent, but I'm going to it, which is, the the start this response was about this depending on where you are in the world listening to this you might call them faculty and administration or you might call them professional services and academic colleagues depending where you are I think about this a lot so across the world at the moment lots of universities are trying to get efficiencies and they're trying to ah reposition themselves for a really changing world and the thing that
00:33:56
Speaker
And I could do a whole podcast on this, but i'm not going to. The thing that really kind of burns me is most institutions just haven't cracked that academic professional services colleague divide. And if you could crack that, the power that you could unlock would be amazing. And the reason you mentioned, yeah the the reason I became really interested in this, when I was a pure academic, I was like, oh I know a bit of everything. So I know about this. I know about that. And then I became an associate dean. So suddenly, most of my role actually became about interacting with various functions across the institution. And it was both a brilliant and a really humbling experience for me because I started to realize I actually don't know a lot of stuff.
00:34:35
Speaker
And more than that, I realized modern university is so complicated that that integration on the student journey where various people come together in various ways is what makes it work.
00:34:48
Speaker
And institutions are thinking, how can we be more efficient? How can work? You know, that to me is one of the big frontiers. It's not AI. it's It's bringing that together. No, it's people. dude i could do Yeah, i could do I could do a whole thing on it because it just...
Integrating Academic and Professional Services
00:35:03
Speaker
Like you, it kind of blows my mind. And again, just a slight minor rant. People get really obsessed with titles and institution. So oh I was heavily involved in enterprise and role.
00:35:15
Speaker
I got money for a productivity and enterprise center. In my final academic role, because I had student student experience in the title, people would say to me, but but you don't know anything about enterprise.
00:35:25
Speaker
I'd say, well, why say that? Because your title is student experience. And universities can just get so weird about all of these little things. And they're to the detriment of what we do. it's really funny, isn't it? We kind of say, you know, see the students as whole people and they've got this range stuff. And then when we turn in to look at ourselves as institutions, it's like,
00:35:48
Speaker
We're incapable of that. so Therefore, your domain expertise must be really narrow about this and you don't know anything else. Sorry, bit tangent for our listeners. But but like that's been my experience. It's challenge.
00:36:00
Speaker
You know people think somehow my job is, like, obviously there's a lot of kind of procedural stuff. and But like the way that I think about my skills and the things that I can talk about,
00:36:13
Speaker
it's so much broader than what universities tend to use me and people like me for. it's It's, yeah, I've been reading um the history of the atomic bomb and just thinking about fission and the amount of energy unleashed by doing that.
Institutional Change as Transformation
00:36:31
Speaker
And that's kind of what you refer to there. It's like a kind of institutional fission that we need to, We need to get into the stands of the University of Chicago and create a giant pile of radioactive material and let it go in order to get there. Because at the moment, we're just these inert it's a inert institutions.
00:36:57
Speaker
So just to finish off um We talked about a range of subjects for me this evening, for you this morning. And at times it might seem to people like we're quite gloomy about in the future, but I'm not actually gloomy about the future.
00:37:11
Speaker
either. Universities are full of really smart people. And so this is this all of the things we talked about are forcing a change. But I'm kind of optimistic. I kind of think that what we might end up with is some of the paradigm shifts that you and I have talked about.
00:37:28
Speaker
i've got I kind of hope that's where we're going to go. Yeah, I tend to think that, like, you kind of, I don't think you use this word, but the kind of mechanistic way of thinking and doing an education is something that i see an opportunity to move past and beyond.
00:37:52
Speaker
And the more that we rebalance what we're doing with what students doing and have them in an alignment, like there's a lot of ah i think there's traditionally been an idea that they're kind of opposed, like even the idea that we we catch students cheating is a very adversarial approach rather than how well do we structure what we're doing to remove incentives to do these things.
Fostering Student Confidence and Adapting to AI
00:38:21
Speaker
and to to look at it more positively rather than spinning our wheels trying to catch them doing naughty things. And by the same token, I think, you know, students, when they just got, especially when they're brought up through high school and there's this constant assessment, they're they're told to panic and worry about you'll ruin your future and and thinking about the world we live in in 2026. So I kind of go anything that gives them more confidence in themselves and convinces them of their own innate abilities. And then they develop upon them has to be a better thing for them as well as society. I think part of the reason that we've ended up at this spot is because we've kind of not so much watered down as, as made it very grindy. Yeah. You know everything's a grind for nearly everyone involved and,
00:39:15
Speaker
If we we stopped grinding and started doing something else than grinding, we'd have to end up in a better place, I think, because it's it doesn't feel too great, ah objectively speaking, as objective as I can. it Nothing feels too fantastic at the moment.
00:39:33
Speaker
But, you know, that's what change is about. Yeah. It is, it is. And just to finish off, it's kind of like, let's say I did this thing at University College London about AI and how will it impact jobs. And that's a really contested space. But the only thing I'd say about that is, let's say all of the people who say AI is going to wipe out a load of jobs are correct. Let's just say that's true.
00:39:53
Speaker
Well, actually, if that's true, then we've got to adapt to that. And, you know, so i guess where I'd finish is saying some of the attempts I'm seeing to retreat into the past just don't work.
00:40:06
Speaker
um It's just, to me... Like, we spent a decade doing it. Like, if you yeah to me, contract cheating was... a not so much a canary as an emu in the coal mine yeah and it should have told us what we needed to start thinking about and acting upon but we didn't across sectors multiple national sectors we didn't do that and now ai came along and squawked in our ear and we've kind of felt that we have to move but there's still resistance it's like trying to push a pyramid and it's not easy
00:40:42
Speaker
yeah But nonetheless, I think generally speaking, we all agree that the pyramid has to move. And so let's get pushing. You know, it's it's pointless standing on the other side, holding you back to it, trying to pretend that it doesn't have to move because it does.
00:40:59
Speaker
It does. Kane, as always, been absolute pleasure. um Absolute. I always get confused now It's summer, isn't it, in Australia? It is summer. It was 37 degrees Celsius here yesterday. it was a touch. Yeah, it's not quite 37 degrees here in Southport near Australia.
00:41:17
Speaker
and It's a bit darker and a bit cooler. but Thank you again for your time. You've always got such interesting things to say. um For our listeners, this has been Talking Transformation.
00:41:27
Speaker
um Do share. And if you've got ideas for the podcast, please do get in touch. And we'll be back with another episode soon.