Quantifying Academic Integrity: Rethinking the Education-Development Link through Platformization in Higher Education

Education, for long indexing development, has been fundementally impacted by “platformization,” whereby quantification through learning analytics mark novel subjectivities, new pedagogies, reformed aspirations and altered forms of capital attached to rethought meanings of value. Focusing on the case of higher education in Turkey, I delve in this talk, into the ethical and moral negotiations engendered by the quantification of academic integrity through softwares like Turnitin.

In line with quantitative approaches to development, “progress” through education can be conveniently calculated through the intense datafication of education-related endevaours. Numbers, in part generated through educational platforms, can serve as development indicators without a critical consideration of how such quantification reorganizes sociabilities and subjectivities. More than 70 of Turkey’s 204 universities were founded after 2000. This proliferation may appear on the surface as contributing to “development.” However, critically engaging with educational sociabilities and and subjectivities, including the impacts of platformization, offers more nuanced insights.

The similarity/plagiarism detection software Turnitin’s “similarity score” constitutes a singularly reliable measure of academic integrity. I argue that quantification, part and parcel of the larger trend of platformization and tied to neoliberalization in higher education both posits academic integrity as a technicality to manage and at the same time engenders novel ethical negotiations. I highlight how what is conventionally regarded as a virtue – academic integrity – appears to become void of this definition but simultaneously acquires new (and negotiated) content through practices around the use of Turnitin. I thus show that a comprehensive consideration of education and its link to development must include the ethically and morally saturated subjectivities and sociabilities of the changing educational field.

The arguments in this talk are based on ethnographic research I conducted in 2019 and 2020 investigating the social dynamics of plagiarism within the context of the neoliberalization of higher education in Turkey.