Last week, I wrote about helping students find academic integrity in their values. Today, I’m transitioning to Gentile’s (2012) three pillars of choice, normalization, and purpose. Voicing academic integrity as a value can only happen when students view being academically honest as a choice. We can normalize this by building cultures that promote honest academic work. Faculty and staff can help students see the value of being students. When the purpose of education is to learn, students may find that making choices that align with their values is a regular occurrence. This in turn gives them the courage to speak out when someone violates that norm.

Gentile (2012, p. 47) writes, “Free will is a matter of free will.” In other words, when students believe they have a choice...

Fall semester is underway for many of us as we welcome new students and already enrolled students to our learning settings. New semesters bring plenty of reasons to be excited and positive in our roles as educators, leaders, and researchers in academia. We would be remiss, however, to downplay the effects that we continue to experience post-pandemic across our learning environments and within our approaches to teaching-learning. Just as we began to share a collective deep breath and settled into new ways of engaging our students we were met with a second challenge, the unprecedented global rise of artificial intelligence applications. Free access to some of the different applications has allowed students to easily adopt them into their daily academic work, sometimes with little apprecia...

The International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI) is four weeks out from the International Day of Action for Academic Integrity! In celebration of this event, this blog will spend the next four weeks focusing on the Fundamental Value of Courage, applying the lens of Giving Voice to Values by Mary Gentile (2012) to educational integrity. The ICAI (2019) defines being courageous as “acting in accordance with one’s convictions.” As practitioners of academic integrity and faculty from a myriad of educational backgrounds, we can help students em...

As the semester progresses, first exams and major assignments are coming due. Offices of Academic Integrity have been preparing by spending the first weeks of the term focusing on education and outreach, but the transition to case resolution is fast approaching. As we pivot towards finding and handling cases of alleged misconduct, one major suggestion for faculty to reduce cases of academic misconduct is simple: remind your students of the honor code before the assignment is due.

This is not something that should take a full lecture session or take away from the content of your course. Instead, I am asking you to remind your students that they have an obligation to turn in honest work. Tell them that it matters what they submit to you, and why. Repeat what is allowed or expected...

Academic integrity policies come into effect through a variety of methods. Whether it is a high stakes academic integrity case on campus or a well-respected integrity crusader that forms the catalyst for implementing new policy or substantially revising an existing approach, the policies themselves—and what we make of them as stakeholders—remain. In Australia (Bretag et al., 2011), Europe (Foltýnek & Glend...

Hello! My name is Abigail Warner, and I am a doctoral student at South College. My dissertation topic is academic misconduct reporting trends, and I am seeking institutional participants for my research study.

The unceremonious shift to emergency remote teaching (ERT) during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in stress and confusion for both students and faculty, as well as a breakdown in communication. News outlets reported on the seemingly dramatic increase in academic misconduct cases at colleges and universities nationwide (Dey, 2021). One study by Lancaster and Cotarlan (2021) found that the number of test-related questions on Chegg increased by 196.25% when comparing five-month time periods in 2019 and 2020, suggesting that the higher levels of reporting w...

It is the start of a new academic year in the northern hemisphere. As classes begin, faculty and students are coming back together to build new relationships and strengthen existing connections. Recently, I met with a student for their remediation program, and one of the things we discussed was their lack of willingness to communicate with faculty. This student had been found responsible for tampering with attendance records by signing into class and participating while not actually being in class. Where was this student? They were not skipping class because they did not wish to go; no, this student was sitting in a hospital room waiting for test results. This situation could have been avoided if the student had contacted the instructor to let them know that they were in the hospital.&n...

I recently read Nicole Campbell and Asil El Galad’s article: The hidden curriculum and its impacts on students and educators which refers to the ”unspoken lessons, messages, norms, values, and perspectives that students learn through their school experiences.” I couldn’t help but see the connections to academic integrity. We expect all students to know about academic integrity when they enter university or college, yet the fact remains – they don’t. It’s hidden.

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The Southeast ICAI conference is back! The Southeast Regional Consortium will be hosting a virtual conference with the theme this year is Connecting to Integrity. Every campus connection has the potential to increase the ethical decision-making capabilities of our students. Faculty help students navigate their courses by setting clear expectations. Students follow the behavior displayed by their peers who exemplify integrity. Staff connect students to resources that can help them complete their academic careers without compromising integrity. This symbiotic connection is maximized when students, faculty, and staff share an innate passion for integrity. This fall we are building on these connections to bring academic integrity to the forefront.

In the face of challenges ...

At the end of the academic year 2022-2023, I moderated a session called Detecting Contract Cheating: Human or Machine facilitated by Kane Murdoch, Head of Complaints, Appeals, and Misconduct at Macquerie University. The session was part of a week-long symposium sponsored by UC San Diego Academic Integrity. I must admit, when I volunteered to moderate I thought, “I don’t know anything about the topic. Why am I here? What am I doing?” Then, my thoughts settled. “I’m not here as the expert on the topic. Kane is.”

So, there I was listening to Kane about contract cheating. “What’s that now? What is he talking about? I don’t understand.” This is what most of us in higher education are feeling with generative artificial intelli...