The Opposite of Cheating Podcast (Season 2) Episode 59: Joe Clare
Source: The Opposite of Cheating
Author / speakers: David Rettinger and Joe Clare
Original source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0Zj1_2eN9w
Published: 2026-05-05
Source type: podcast / video interview
Summary
David Rettinger interviews criminologist Joe Clare about applying situational crime prevention to academic misconduct. Clare argues that universities cannot control every student’s disposition to cheat, but they can redesign the opportunity structure around assessments. Drawing on crime-prevention concepts such as concentrated offending, repeat victimization, crime concentration at place, and Ron Clarke’s situational crime-prevention levers, Clare frames cheating prevention as a design problem: increase effort, increase risk, reduce rewards, remove provocations, and reduce excuses. Rettinger connects this to choice architecture: not simply inspiring students or policing them, but making misconduct harder and honest work the path of least resistance.
Pull quotes
Design matters
“You can’t design cheating out of a unit or a course, but you can absolutely design it in.”
— David Rettinger, attributing the idea to Cath Ellis
Opportunity is the controllable lever
“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.”
— Joe Clare
Choice architecture
“We can engineer choice architecture in such a way that we are reducing misconduct not by inspiring students and not by policing students but rather by making not doing misconduct the path of least resistance.”
— David Rettinger
Big ideas
Claims
- In an AI world, assessment should focus on watching students think
- AI-era assessment needs program-level validation
Key evidence and examples
- Clare distinguishes crime-focused criminology from offender-focused criminology: prevention can often work by changing the conditions under which misconduct becomes easy, not by changing individual dispositions.
- He maps academic misconduct to crime-prevention concepts: a small group may offend repeatedly, but institutions can still reduce opportunities embedded in assignments, course structures, and university processes.
- He uses vehicle immobilizers and prepaid fuel as examples of opportunity reduction: some problems decline when the easiest pathway to the unwanted behavior is removed.
- He describes a contract-cheating case in a business-school capstone where the instructor redesigned compromised scenarios, added whistleblower channels, clarified integrity rules, and changed group structures, including mid-semester group reassignment.
- The conversation frames assessment design as choice architecture: reduce rewards, increase effort and risk, remove provocations, and reduce excuses so honest participation becomes easier than misconduct.
Education relevance
High relevance for academic integrity, assessment redesign, higher-education course design, and Clay’s recurring distinction between assessment-integrity work and AI-literacy work. The source adds a non-AI-specific framework that can help schools and universities think about misconduct as an opportunity-design problem rather than only a detection or character problem.
Durability note
The specific examples come from higher education and criminology, but the opportunity-design frame is likely to recur in AI-era assessment conversations because it gives educators a practical vocabulary for changing assignments, validation points, and course conditions rather than relying only on deterrence or detection.
My notes
- Clay highlighted the line: “You can’t design academic misconduct out, but you can certainly design it in.”
- Clay also noted “Choice Architecture,” which is the most useful bridge between situational crime prevention and assessment integrity.