The Opposite of Cheating Podcast (Season 2) Episode 55: Mary Davis & Zeenath Khan

"The shift needs to be about internalizing that [ethical] responsibility within the student."

"Do you want to go up and upskill and continue focusing on your learning or do you want to go down and downskill and reduce or eliminate your learning?"

In this 55th episode of The Opposite of Cheating Podcast, Tricia is joined by her co-authors Mary Davis (Oxford Brookes University) and Zeneeth Khan (University of Wollongong, Dubai) to discuss their forthcoming Cambridge University Press book, Academic Integrity in the Age of AI (https://www.cambridge.org/core/publications/elements/generative-ai-in-education), an element in the GenerativeAI and Education series edited by Tamara Tate & Mark Warschauer.

The conversation opens with unforgettable origin stories — Zeneeth's transformation from a teenage cheating ringleader to an integrity champion after a convent school principal's brilliant intervention, and Mary's early battle to use Turnitin as a formative learning tool when the establishment called her "subversive" for doing so. From there, the trio explores their new book's key themes: the historical pattern of moral panic followed by thoughtful integration whenever new technologies disrupt education, the importance of students' ethical agency and moral responsibility, and practical strategies for teaching integrity rather than just policing violations. A standout thread is the insistence that students — even young ones — are fully capable of owning their ethical decisions when educators explain the why behind the guardrails, not just the rules themselves.

You can follow Mary on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/professor-mary-davis-a47089167/ and Zeenath at https://www.linkedin.com/in/zeenath-reza-khan-phd-9490a348/.

(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).