Academic misconduct: Perspectives of sessional academic staff

Research about academic practices concerning academic integrity tends to concentrate on the needs of continuing academic staff and not sessional academic staff (Lefoe, Parrish, Malfroy, & McKenzie 2011). Amongst other quality governance aspects, Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA, 2017) requires that higher education providers give staff guidance and training on what constitutes academic research and developing good practices to maintain academic integrity. However, the precursor to any guidance would be an understanding of the problems sessional academic staff encounter with respect to teaching students about academic integrity and dealing with academic misconduct. Through a qualitative data analysis approach that employed focus groups as the data collection mechanism, this study filled that gap by investigating the experiences of sessional academic staff in an Australian regional university with regards to academic integrity. The preliminary findings of the research project identified contract cheating, inappropriate referencing, manipulation of plagiarism detection software and academic dishonesty by International students as main problems. These findings have implications for all teaching staff who can mould their teaching practices and design assessments to reduce academic misconduct incidents. Future studies can outline strategies to mitigate these problems and identify ways to build academic integrity concepts into teaching.