Book chapter
How to Stop the Growing Tide of Student Dishonesty in Russia?
In book
The lack of academic integrity combined with the prevalence of fraud and other forms of unethical behavior are problems that higher education faces in both developing and developed countries, at mass and elite universities, and at public and private institutions. While academic misconduct is not new, massification, internationalization, privatization, digitalization, and commercialization have placed ethical challenges higher on the agenda for many universities. Corruption in academia is particularly unfortunate, not only because the high social regard that universities have traditionally enjoyed, but also because students—young people in critical formative years—spend a significant amount of time in universities. How they experience corruption while enrolled might influence their later personal and professional behavior, the future of their country, and much more. Further, the corruption of the research enterprise is especially serious for the future of science. The contributors to Corruption in Higher Education: Global Challenges and Responses bring a range of perspectives to this critical topic.
This book provides an overview of the major findings of the comparative research project, Changes in Networks, Higher Education and Knowledge Society (CINHEKS). The main aim of this international comparative research project is the analysis of how Higher education institutions are networked within distinct knowledge societies in two key regions of the world: Europe and the United States of America. This research project was carried out in four European countries (Finland, Germany, Portugal and the United Kingdom) and in two different states in the United States of America. In addition, during the course of the research, a team from the Russian Federation joined the CINHEKS study. The analysis is contextually grounded in a comparative policy analysis focused on the main developments and understandings of the ideas surrounding the term knowledge society, in all countries concerned. Empirical elaboration is established via a series of sequential studies, each building, incrementally, on the previous study. These studies include institutional profiles of higher education institutions, institutional case studies, and an international comparative survey that illuminates academics’ social networks. The research findings broaden our understanding of the differences and similarities in how higher education institutions and individual academics are networked within and between societies that understand themselves as knowledge societies. The book introduces a novel analytical synthesis, which asserts contemporary societies have evolved into Networked Knowledge Societies. Methodologically, the book both challenges and raises the bar for previous approaches in comparative higher education, in terms of research design, execution and lays the groundwork for a new generation of international comparative higher education research. (from Springer website)
The study aims to find out how plagiarism and cheating as dishonest practices correlate with personal characteristics of students (e.g. their involvement in learning and research activities) and specific features of the learning environment. The survey of university students and professors conducted as part of the 2014 Monitoring of Education Markets and Organizations provided the empirical basis for research. The impact of factors was assessed using two binary logistic regressions with response variables describing presence/absence of cheating and plagiarism experience. We show that these types of academic misconduct are not affected by whether or not the university applies formal or informal plagiarism checking techniques. Professor intolerance to cheating and willingness to take strict punitive measures appears to play a more important role in preventing academic dishonesty. Probability of using dishonest practices is also decreased by such factors as intensive preparation for classes, confidence in working in one’s field of study in the future, orientation towards the quality of education instead of its accessibility when choosing university and major.
The chapter is devoted to the analysis of the impact of the global academic rankings and the concept of world-class university upon the system of high education both globally and in contemporary Russia. The author analyses the use of the rankings in benchmarking and strategy planning, and demonstrates negative influence of the obsession with the rankings in some countries. The chapter considers the case of the strategy of Ural Federal University (Russia) as one of the examples of both use and abuse of the rankings in large regional Russian university. The author argues for the necessity of organizing transnational associations and consortia of the universities, especially in emerging countries (BRICS nations, for example), to resist neo-Imperial features of today's global Academia. One of the remedies the chapter proposes is to adopt the idea of plural modernities from sociology and to treat global education environment as kind of a multi-polar world. Then, the author argues, the rankings should be supplemented with qualitative comparative analysis of educational systems.
Academic dishonesty among university students is a major problem for higher education and has negative economic impacts in a lot of countries including Russia. While exploring why students choose dishonest ways of obtaining good grades instead of getting involved in the learning process and acquiring as much knowledge and experience at the university as possible, most researchers focus on academic dishonest practices, ignoring the reasons for and factors of honest learning behavior. We regard student engagement as the opposite of academic dishonesty and propose a conceptual model of how academic honesty at the university influences various aspects of student engagement in learning. We conduct an empirical study to test the hypothesis on the correlation between characteristics of honesty at the university and parameters of student engagement suggested as part of the conceptual model. We use the data collected by the Monitoring of Student Characteristics and Trajectories carried out in universities included in the Russian Association of Leading Universities in Economics and Management. Having analyzed the data on management and economics students in eight Russian universities, we conclude that the suggested hypothesis has been largely confirmed, and the proposed conceptual model may serve a productive basis for empirical research on the correlation between academic environment parameters and student learning behavior.
Our analysis has confirmed the existence of gender wage gap in the Russian academia: on average, male faculty members earn 16-18% more than their female colleagues. Higher Education in Russia and Beyond / №4(14) / Winter 2017 12 Similar results are valid for the comparison of hourly wages. Nevertheless, gender wage gap in the academia in Russia is below national average. Controlled for position, academic degree and work experience, men’s wage ‘premium’ over women decreases to 8%. The main reasons for the wage gap are gender differences in position and seniority, the fact that men are more likely to have an academic degree and on average have longer work experience (both total and in teaching) than women. The problem of ‘glass ceiling’ does exist at Russian HEIs: it is more difficult for women to raise higher in the academic hierarchy, though this might partially be due to self-selection
Drawing on the discourse analysis of the higher education policy documents from 1950s to 2013 and interviews in two Russian universities, the chapter addresses the transformations in the purposes of higher education. The findings show that the main dichotomy in regard of the purposes of higher education unfolds between economic instrumentalism (vocational training) and social instrumentalism (personal development). In the Soviet documents, higher education was considered both as an instrument of national socio-economic development (through vocational training) and an instrument of individual growth. The latter role was predominant as education was an essential part of the broader social project of constructing a “new Soviet man”. In the transition period of mid-1980s–mid 1990s the policy discourse reflects an attempt to depart from economic instrumentalism and focus on the humanistic and social nature of education. Later documents present the transition to the economic instrumentalism emphasizing the economic role and economic rationales in higher education policy, which reflects the nature of the recent neoliberal reforms in the country. However, at the institutional level, social reality is more complex: there are significant tensions between economic purposes of higher education, utilitarianism, interiorized by administrators and faculty since the Soviet time, and social mission of higher education they face every day. Revealing the continuities in the discourse over several decades, the chapter shows that the predominance of economic discourse leads to the distortion of the educational mission of higher education, and in the environment impoverished by economic rationales, the importance of the social purposes of higher education has been rising.