Growing levels of “micro-cheating” by academics are being ignored as universities focus on detecting more serious allegations of scientific misconduct and students’ unauthorised use of artificial intelligence (AI), a leading educationalist has claimed.
In a new paper in the journal Perspective of Higher Education, Bruce Macfarlane, dean of the Faculty of Education at The Education University of Hong Kong, argues increased efforts to tackle more blatant types of academic fraud, such as falsification, fabrication or plagiarism, and a “moral panic” over student cheating using AI have led scholars to become more accepting of “more subtle forms of cheating that are harder to detect and attract less public attention”.
Often described as “questionable research practices”, Macfarlane contends that behaviour such as “double dipping” – when an academic publishes two papers that are substantially the same – and excessive self-citation (“citing oneself gratuitously even when others are recognised as more significant authorities in the academic field”) should instead be labelled “micro-cheating”.
Other examples include “symbolic citation” in which scholars cite publications through relying on others’ reading lists rather than reading the original text oneself, explains the paper titled “Micro-cheating practices and scholarly hypocrisy”.
