Understanding Academic Dishonesty, Accommodation, Accountability, and Alternative Assessment

What is Academic dishonesty?

What is Academic dishonesty?

Academic cheating or plagiarism. It is an act of misconduct in an academic setting. It is any type of cheating in a formal academic activity that can include copying information without proper citation, fabrication of information or data, an attempt to obtain assistance without acknowledgement, assisting others without acknowledging the assistance. As such, it is unethical behavior in an academic setting and has punishable consequences that vary in severity from one academic institution to another.

1. An accommodation is a modification in instructional or assessment methods that allow students with physical or learning disabilities, to learn and perform tasks without undue burden. It is a way of making learning and assessment more equitable for those with disabilities.

2. Accommodation is the process of making assessment strategies and tools suitable for the characteristics of an individual in an assessment situation to make accurate interpretations of their performance.

Assessments are typically used for the purpose of accountability: to ensure that systems, institutions, teachers and students are ‘accountable’ for academic achievement.

Accuracy is the degree of conformity to a correct or precise value, truth, fact or standard: it is the state of being correct, precise or exact.

It is a test that measures to what extent a student has attained skills and knowledge in a specific period of training or learning. It is a type of criterion-referenced test that assesses the competencies gained by learners in light of prescribed or specific learning outcomes. Mid-term and final exams are good examples of achievement tests.

Based in the USA, the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages is an organization that promotes teaching and learning of all languages. In language assessment, it is particularly known for its training and certification (on-going) of oral proficiency interview testers. Association of Language Testers in Europe (ALTE)

The Association of Language Testers in Europe is a European organization that promotes fairness and accuracy in language testing, through establishing common standards of practice in language test development and implementation.

Alternative assessment is the type of assessment that measures student performance in ways that are different from the traditional paper-and-pencil and short answer tests. Alternative assessment focuses on the individual student’s overall progress. These types of assessments are not graded in the same way as standardized tests, where the number of right and wrong responses is counted. Instead, they look at the holistic performance of the students by highlighting their abilities and their overall improvement.

Some of the tools used for alternative assessment include: performance-based assessments (projects, role playing, experiments and demonstrations); open-ended questions; written essays; interviews; journals and learning logs; portfolios; self and peer assessments; authentic assessment; and others. In order to evaluate any alternative assessment, a rubric is created as a guiding tool to help objectively evaluate the progress and performance of the students. Such rubrics help verify and identify the quality of the assignment presented. These rubrics use descriptive language in which specific words are used like “the essay contains more than three compound sentences”, “the presentation uses 4–6 slides”, “the interview has less than 3 grammatical errors”, etc.

Alternative forms reliability is a means of establishing the reliability of a test through the administration of two forms of a test determined to be parallel with regard to item type, content, difficulty level, and number, along with administrative conditions that are the same in the two versions of the test.