Episode 59: Joe Clare
- drbertramgallant
- May 5
- 2 min read
"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.)
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