The Opposite of Cheating

The Opposite of Cheating (Season 2) Episode 61: Jessa Kirk

"We don't all have to embrace AI as many of us are being told to. But we should be prepared to consider different perspectives and change the way that we're doing things if we're finding that something's not working.""You might think that you're being kind by bending the rules for a student when actually that's modeling something that you don't want your students to do."In this 61st episode of The Opposite of Cheating Podcast, David sits down with Jessa Kirk, Education Specialist in the Academic Integrity Office at UC Santa Cruz, to talk about what happens when you treat students found responsible for misconduct not as problems to process but as people to connect with. Jessa brings a decade of K-12 teaching experience at a small independent school, where a formative incident with a ninth grader who submitted her brother's paper set her on a path toward building fair, repeatable systems for responding to academic dishonesty. At UCSC, she's designed a suite of educational interventions — an integrity tutorial with required in-person peer educator meetings, a quarter-long integrity mentorship for more serious cases, and a brand-new integrity seminar that replaces suspension — all grounded in human connection over compliance. She describes watching students walk into the first seminar meeting tense and clutching their backpacks, and by the fifth meeting laughing, staying after to say thank you. Throughout the conversation, Jessa makes a passionate case for prioritizing in-person communication, noting that K-12 teachers are sounding the alarm about students struggling with basic interpersonal skills — and that higher ed needs to prepare for the students it's about to receive. Her advice to faculty: put away the devices, make space for real conversation, and remember that students are hungry for it even when they don't know how to ask.You can learn more about UCSC's Academic Integrity Office at https://undergraduate.ucsc.edu/our-units/academic-integrity-office/ and follow Jessa on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessa-kirk-50368a4b/(Disclaimer: episode quotes and summary were created using YouTube's transcript and Claude and edited by a human. Any errors are the responsibility of the human.)

The Opposite of Cheating Podcast (Season 2) Episode 60: Loretta Goff

"The general tools are not built for learning. You have to really know what you're doing to use them. It's very easy to end up being led by them because of the way they communicate.""If I had the magic wand, it would give everyone the time and the resources to really be able to focus on how they're teaching and how they're assessing."In this 60th episode of The Opposite of Cheating Podcast, David sits down with Dr. Loretta Goff, Academic Integrity Education Officer at University College Cork, for a conversation about what it looks like to build an integrity culture from the ground up — and why Ireland's approach is worth paying attention to. Loretta describes how national funding through the Higher Education Authority enabled Irish institutions to create dedicated academic integrity roles, and how UCC intentionally split theirs into two positions: one focused on policy and procedure, the other — Loretta's — strictly on education. She shares what's working at UCC, from postgraduate tutors trained as academic integrity champions who run campus pop-up stands and meme competitions, to a digital badge course for faculty, to a structured remediation pathway for students who stumble. The conversation turns to emerging findings from UCC's student and faculty surveys, which reveal a troubling trust gap between educators and students, a growing sense among non-AI-users that they're being disadvantaged by peers who offload to AI, and a demotivation around learning itself driven by time poverty and the cost-of-living crisis. Loretta's advice for anyone starting out? Transparency — it's free, it barely takes extra time, and it works.You can follow Loretta on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/loretta-goff-5a51a95a/ and learn more about her at https://www.ucc.ie/en/skillscentre/about/meettheteam/.(Disclaimer: episode quotes and summary were created using YouTube's transcript and Claude and edited by a human. Any errors are the responsibility of the human.)

The Opposite of Cheating Podcast (Season 2) Episode 59: Joe Clare

"There are actually things I can do and it's empowering I think for academics at a time where it can feel a bit overwhelming — there's actually a range of things that we can do.""The thing you can try and limit is the extent to which opportunity exists within the assessment items and the structure of the things you're doing in your unit."In this 59th episode of The Opposite of Cheating Podcast, David sits down with Professor Joe Clare, a criminologist at the University of Western Australia, for a fascinating conversation about what crime prevention science can teach us about academic integrity. Joe explains how his background in cognitive science and environmental criminology led him to a crucial insight: just as car theft plummeted worldwide not because criminals reformed but because manufacturers built in electronic immobilizers, academic misconduct can be dramatically reduced by redesigning the opportunity structure of assessments rather than trying to change student dispositions. Drawing on Ron Clarke's 25 techniques of situational crime prevention — increasing risk, increasing effort, reducing reward, removing provocation, and reducing excuses — Joe walks through a real case study at Curtin University where a colleague unknowingly applied this entire framework to shut down a contract cheating operation in a business school capstone course. The conversation surfaces a powerful third approach to integrity that sits alongside values-based education and assessment security: choice architecture, or making not cheating the path of least resistance. Joe also draws on the "law of crime concentration at place" to remind us that spikes in misconduct are usually local problems requiring local fixes, and that the data consistently shows most students do the right thing most of the time.You can follow Joe on Linked at https://www.linkedin.com/in/joseph-clare-05098449/ and see his ORCID page (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0444-4189) for more on his research.(Disclaimer: episode quotes and summary were created using YouTube's transcript and Claude and edited by a human. Any errors are the responsibility of the human.)

The Opposite of Cheating Podcast (Season 2) Episode 58: Jason Stephens

"Our tendency to deceive and our tendency to make moral judgments — both of these things are bred in the bone. These things live in tension inside of us.""I'm working on what I call a wise model of use — where I want to help students balance outsourcing stuff that's appropriate to outsource versus offloading the stuff I really should be engaging in because learning is difficult."In this 58th episode of The Opposite of Cheating Podcast, David reconnects with longtime friend and collaborator Dr. Jason Stephens, a professor of psychological studies at the University of Auckland, for a deep dive into the moral psychology of cheating.Jason explains why, if he had to pick one variable to understand academic dishonesty, it would be moral disengagement — the rationalizations we use to protect our self-image after doing something we know is wrong. Drawing on Bandura, Freud, and evolutionary psychology, he traces the tension between two tendencies bred into humans: the impulse to deceive (older than morality itself, visible across nearly every species) and the social need to make moral judgments and appear trustworthy. Jason outlines his three-cluster model of why students cheat — under pressure, under interested, and unable — and describes how context and culture determine which tendency wins out. The conversation turns to AI, where Jason shares his "wise model of use," helping students distinguish between outsourcing extraneous cognitive load and offloading the hard thinking that constitutes real learning, using tools like Cogniti and Cadmus to scaffold that process. Both scholars agree that the deeper threat of AI may not be academic integrity at all, but the erosion of human connection as people increasingly turn to machines for social and emotional needs.(Disclaimer: episode quotes and summary were created using Youtube's Transcript and Anthropic's Claude but edited by a human. Any errors are the responsibility of the human).

The Opposite of Cheating Podcast (Season 2) Episode 57: Kelly Ahuna

"The future of the asynchronous online class, I think, is really in jeopardy. The classes are fine, but the assessments are completely cooked.""We're not going to win this on compliance. We're not going to win this with students because we say, 'We told you not to.' We have to win it on the value of learning."In this 57th episode of The Opposite of Cheating Podcast, David is joined by Dr. Kelly Ahuna, Director of the Office of Academic Integrity at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), to discuss the nuts and bolts of running one of the most active academic integrity programs in the country. Kelly shares how UB built its centralized office from scratch in 2019, placing it under academic affairs rather than student affairs — a deliberate choice that shapes their education-first approach. The conversation covers UB's innovative remediation process for first-time offenders, their student integrity ambassador program, and their annual Academic Integrity Awards ceremony held near National Honesty Day. Kelly and David also dig into the practical challenges AI poses — from repeat offenses driven by students' perception that AI-assisted cheating "doesn't feel as bad," to the impossibility of drawing a clear line between brainstorming and writing when the tools keep asking "would you like me to do more?" Throughout, Kelly emphasizes that enforcement alone will never solve the problem — the path forward lies in values-based education, peer-to-peer conversation, and building a culture where integrity is celebrated, not just policed.You can learn more about Kelly and the University of Buffalo's approach to academic integrity at https://www.buffalo.edu/academic-integrity.html(Disclaimer: episode quotes and summary were created using Youtube's Transcript and Anthropic's Claude but edited by a human. Any errors are the responsibility of the human).