Being passionate about learning for a decade, Central Mediterranean Business School has put shaping a bright future for education and transforming the professional environment for the better among the main goals. We are driven by the idea of equal opportunities for people from all backgrounds, innovative approaches to problem-solving, and building relationships based on trust, support, and transparency. Helping our students and graduates to grow and achieve their goals, we not simply do our job, but fulfill our mission to make the world a better place through small steps, qualified honest specialists, and new standards in work, education, and service.
Same as the whole world in recent years, education has faced many challenges, and CMBS is no exception. Though acknowledging that navigating the modern learning landscape may be difficult, we believe that the new questions bring novel solutions, ultimately elevating the quality of education and task-solving. Here we will talk about our approach to preserving academic integrity and authenticity in the times of AI chatbots, informational overload, and easy access to any sources.
Why we care for academic integrity
Whatever we do at CMBS, we rely on our core values, which are impossible to implement without honesty and integrity. Here are the pillars our institution stands at.
- Revolutionising the way people learn. In our fast-paced reality staying in trend is not enough. One needs to oversee the tendencies and bring groundbreaking solutions into action. When it comes to learning, we strive to shape the mindset and foster critical thinking, nurturing leaders and decision-makers rather than providing skills and knowledge by itself. We believe the ability to filter, process, and implement the information is even more important than mastering it.
- Becoming the change. We believe in small steps and the importance of impact each of us makes for bigger shifts we want to see in the world. Encouraging transparency, integrity, and honesty, and setting the highest bar in education and work ethics, we contribute to shaping the ethical, inspiring, and nourishing environment for future generations.
- Providing a top-notch level of education. The experts we foster represent us better than any marketing strategy. Relying on the academic integrity honor code, we ensure we equip our students with relevant skills and knowledge getting them ready for real-world tasks; treating all the learners equally, and empowering them with the tools to succeed in future careers.
- Making knowledge and training accessible. Everyone deserves a chance to change their career and future for the better. We approach our students equally regardless of their backgrounds. However, we recognise the impact cultural differences may have on the international community, which is why we want to facilitate integrating new standards and acquiring new skills. We believe in education and motivation rather than punishment and penalising, which makes maintaining integrity a complex and comprehensive mission.
- Implementing a real-world approach. The way young specialists show up and perform at the educational level reflects and shapes their work behaviour and ethics. That is why we ensure integrity and honesty are among the core values we promote among our graduates. Moreover, we prepare young people for the challenges they face at the workplace in real life, hence we want them to master the skills and technologies relevant to their everyday tasks rather than gaining knowledge to pass the theoretical test.
- Improving and developing every day. Our instructors are up-to-date with the latest trends in learning and their subject and never stop mastering new tools and technologies. To keep them inspired and ready to face changes, we make facilitation of their workflow and automating routines one of CMBS’ priorities.
Modern challenges of the digital era
Having more opportunities than ever, modern society, at the same time, faces challenges as never before. In education, it means the need to look for new approaches to motivating students, encouraging transparency, and protecting integrity. Here are the most common issues educators face nowadays.
Plagiarism
Plagiarism has been in academia since the time of writing tests in class on paper. However, in the digital era copying has become even trickier and easier, as students can borrow information in one click, rewrite it with AI-based tools even without the need to read, and access any source with a minute search. The old familiar copying from each other has also never left the scene but has become more difficult to catch due to the text-transforming tools some students apply to disguise plagiarism.
AI plagiarism
Among other groundbreaking opportunities and unexpected issues, AI tools have brought a completely new notion of AI plagiarism. This problem occurs when one generates a text with an AI chatbot. Firstly, AI by itself borrows data from different sources, so the produced content by no means can be considered original. Moreover, it happens that direct matches can be found between AI-generated text and the sources it recruited, causing plagiarism-related repercussions.
We believe students should be ready for the modern world challenges and learn to apply the tools ethically; that is why we do not ban novel tools but teach to implement them moderately. AI-related plagiarism is definitely one of the issues that should be addressed, as it demonstrates the importance of critical thinking, original effort, and reworking any output one gets from AI tools.
AI misuse
Being generally helpful, AI chatbots have become a dare for teachers, forcing them to look for completely new approaches to assignment-checking. Educating the students on moderate and ethical AI implementation, we can not deny the fact AI cheating occurs, and the complications with distinguishing between AI-generated assignments and authentic works emerge. Obviously, in this case, measures should be taken to prevent students from AI cheating, so all learners are treated equally, and teachers do not spend their precious time on robot-generated assignments.
CMBS adaptive anti-plagiarism strategy
Staying open to new solutions and always looking for development, we embrace the challenges as a chance to evolve and discover new possibilities to grow. As academic integrity and honest work are among CMBS’s crucial priorities, we have implemented several strategies allowing protect originality without compromising the quality of education and trust between teachers and students. Moreover, they help us facilitate instructors’ routines so they can focus on actual teaching instead of originality checks.
Plagiarism checking
Introducing a plagiarism checker into the teachers’ workflow has become a game-changer for CMBS. We use the PlagiarismCheck.org detector which allows us to integrate plagiarism scanning into our system and ensure originality without spending additional time and effort.
- We want to avoid overwhelming our instructors with new tools and procedures, so the easiness of tool implementation is crucial. In this case, we integrate the detector into the Learning Management System, so the teachers can see the plagiarism checking result in one button click right in the LMS. Moreover, the tool allows us to check for plagiarism on Google Docs as an add-on and simply in the browser as an extension.
- All checking processes are automated, so the teachers do not need to compare anything manually. With one click they get a comprehensive report with all the information they need to evaluate the assignment. So, instead of being piled up under the texts and browser tabs, our instructors are able to focus on self-development, preparing for lessons, and being emotionally engaged in class.
- We can add our own documents to the database against which the comparison is being performed. That means that whenever our students copy from each other or take the works from the previous courses, the tool catches it and recognises it as plagiarism.
- As a result of the check, teachers get a detailed report with the links to the sources where the matching content has been found. The tool also highlights the parts where the alleged plagiarism has been detected. The papers’ evaluation still requires human judgment and involvement, but this information makes the process much easier: our instructors can analyse the matches detected and draw evidence-based conclusions.
- We believe this approach helps to build trust between teachers and students, as instead of abstract accusations the instructor can share a downloadable PDF report with the highlighted problematic parts and start an open dialogue.
- Students also recruit a plagiarism scanner in their workflow, checking their assignments before submitting them to the teacher. This way they can avoid accidental plagiarism, educate themselves on the originality importance, check if they cited properly, and work on their mistakes even before getting the teacher’s feedback.
Along with the plagiarism detector, the tool has the Grammar Checker that presents a clear picture to the teacher facilitating the checking process; and helps students focus on their original ideas catching typos, misspelled words, and punctuation errors for better quality writing.
AI detection
We use an AI detector to help teachers catch AI cheating and prevent students from abusing the technology that was meant to facilitate routines and help with creative tasks. Despite the AI detectors controversy, we believe this solution accelerates mundane tasks and supports academic integrity in our institution.
- The detector highlights the parts that may contain AI-generated text. This way, the instructors can pay attention to these extracts or confirm their guesses if some paragraphs seem suspicious.
- The tool does not say for sure whether the text has been AI-generated or human-written. Instead, it compares the content to what it knows about machine and human writing patterns and shows the probability at which AI cheating might be the case.
- We do not recommend instructors take the AI detection results as an ultimate truth, so the final decision is still to be made by the teacher. However, the tool helps to bring the potentially generated text into the spotlight and focus on analysing it instead of processing tons of writing in an attempt to catch AI-produced sentences.
- AI detector is seamlessly integrated into our processes. Teachers can check for AI with a simple button click in the LMS, use the tool in the browser, and get the result together with a plagiarism check report.
- AI checking tool works best combined with a plagiarism detector. Whenever the teacher has doubts regarding the text origin they can analyse it for matching parts and AI traces and evaluate the paper based on this data.
Combining AI and plagiarism detection makes PlagiarismCheck.org a comprehensive and easy-to-use solution, as our instructors appreciate the opportunity to master one tool instead of learning to implement different instruments.
The results
Implementing AI and plagiarism checking has elevated work and studying routines in our institution. Through developing an academic integrity strategy CMBS guarantees high-quality education and maintains the reputation of a trustworthy institution both locally and internationally. Moreover, we help our students develop their writing skills, and foster specialists with sharp work ethics.
- Implementing high-tech solutions empowers our students to become competent and confident specialists equipped for modern workflows and familiar with the tools required for productive routines.
- The processes in our institution are transparent and efficient. The task evaluation relies on the originality and authenticity analysis performed by the tools accessible to all participants, which makes all the decisions evidence-based and data-driven.
- Our students are educated on originality and authenticity importance, which shapes their working ethics. We believe that soft skills, decency, and honesty are as important as professional competence. Hence ensuring our graduates maintain and promote these qualities is paramount.
- Our teachers spend less time and effort on draining text-checking tasks and can focus on creativity, planning, and self-improvement.
- We provide equal opportunities to our learners, ensuring fair evaluation of genuine efforts and repercussions for those who violate the academic integrity honour code.
- The reputation of CMBS is safeguarded as we are sure all the papers we publish are original and authentic, and the graduates we foster support the same values that we embody as an institution.
In the fast-paced ever-changing times it is impossible to prepare for all challenges. However, with our adaptive academic integrity strategy CMBS graduates are confident in expressing their ideas and can boast a critical mindset, which enables them to be flexible in navigating the tricky professional landscape. Meanwhile, we are positive that the solutions we use reflect our core values and guide us to the better future we build for education.
