Promoting Academic Integrity: Challenges for Ukrainian Universities

Background

The struggle to adhere to the principles of AI at Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and research institutions has long been limited to combating plagiarism, incorrect referencing technique, text borrowing, and other authored material(s) without proper reference to the ‘original’ source. The low base until 2017 (and these are the Laws of Ukraine ‘On Higher Education’ at a specified time, ‘On Copyright and Related Rights’, the ‘Criminal Code of Ukraine’ and other normative acts) indicates the inadmissibility of plagiarism in educational and scientific works, as well as describes in principle the sanctions for breaking AI. Other manifestations of academic disgrace have actually been left beyond the attention of educational and scientific community. Accordingly, building a system to promote compliance with the principles of AI in this case was based only on the statement of plagiarism as the only violation of AI principles.

The gradual acquisition of the developed countries experience in the sense of systematic approach to combating academic insecurity has given rise to the understanding of a fairly wide range by insecurity manifestations, which was not given particular attention until. Of course, these manifestations were known to the teachers and scholars, but the desire to combat them was hampered by the following causes:

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  Continuous improvement of the curricula to be updated annually by about 20-30%;

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  Development of new approaches to conducting theoretical lecture-style classes that involve discussion between a lecturer and a student;

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  Improvement of information provision for the educational process i.e., mandatory availability of distance and mass open online courses on discipline, introduction technology of mixed learning;

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  Lack of time to detect manifestations of academic misconduct as a result of overloaded curricula i.e., coverage of wide range of theoretical and practical tasks that need to be worked out during class work; and

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  Mandatory introduction to practical courses e.g., role-playing games, practical cases, essays etc. that exclude reference to AI.

All these reasons, as well as a weak link with employers, made the learning process ‘patterned’. Overloaded academic tasks (most of which, incidentally, have a theoretical or computational nature) force students to resort to ease of training. Manifestations of academic misconduct are a consequence of this phenomenon.

Literature Review

The introduction of the concept ‘AI’ into the legislative basis on Ukraine education and science took place in September 2017. The Law of Ukraine ‘On Education’ declares that:

The same article provides brief descriptive principles of AI. The time of official recognition phenomenon ‘AI’ in the educational and scientific space of Ukraine suggests that this definition is innovative at the national level.