Two sides of the same coin: a taxonomy of academic integrity and impropriety using intellectual virtues and vices

Abstract

While the integrity of academic work has always been vitally important, since the establishment of the International Center for Academic Integrity in 1992 increasing attention has been paid to the area. The term academic integrity now explicitly appears in policy and in job titles or offices tasked with either detection, training, or both. Equally, regulatory, quality and standards agencies, such as Quality and Qualifications Ireland (QQI), the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) in the UK, and the Australian Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) have mobilised around academic integrity with frameworks, lexicons, charters and networks that offer national guidance and promote shared action and understanding. However, despite efforts to interrogate and standardise the use of the term ‘academic integrity’ from those working and researching in the field, it is often used inconsistently and frequently conflated with its opposite – academic misconduct – in practice. Our aim, in this paper, is to acknowledge a lack of clarity around the term ‘academic integrity’ and to address this ambiguity by offering a taxonomy of academic integrity. We will arrive at the taxonomy of academic integrity through philosophical conceptual analysis and making use of pre-existing philosophical work in virtue (and vice) epistemology. The outcome of this analysis will be a taxonomy of academic integrity that represents the various concepts related to it in an organised way, classified into distinct groups, along with a graphic to aid understanding.

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