Disclaimer: the author is not a physician nor a psychologist, and this post is satire masquerading as advice. Advice not guaranteed to work for everyone. The prescriptions offered in this post have not been evaluated by anyone with the credentials to prescribe such cures. 

Have you felt like you want to throw your printer against the wall because it keeps jamming? Or invading another’s territory because you believe like they’re doing it wrong? Do you find yourself binge watching netflix all day, feeling guilty about it but being unable to motivate yourself to do more? Are you painfully aware that you’re preaching one edict but practicing another?

You may be facing a condition known as Integrity Depletion Syndrome or ...

Written by Cath Ellis, Professor, Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture, The University of New South Wales

Recently I was honoured to speak at the academic integrity awards ceremony held (virtually) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). I’d been asked to speak specifically about the Courageous Conversations program here at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia. Before me, UCSD’s Executive Vice-Chancellor Professor Elizabeth H. Simmons remarked that Academic Integrity is the ‘glue’ that binds educational institu...

Is the person asking to be admitted to an exam the person who is supposed to be taking the exam? How do you prove this person should have access to exam items?

One of the first steps in admitting a person to sit for an exam is checking their identification (ID). Typically, people present a driver license, state issued ID, military ID, or passport for vendor exams, and student IDs for academic exams. The topic of vetting student IDs requires a volume of its own. This post is focused on the ID types used for vendor testing.

The topic of fake IDs became an issue for me many years ago when I was new to the testing world. A test-taker presented me with a passport from a country I knew by name, could come reasonably close to locating on a world map, but had no idea what their ...

I have been thinking a lot about the title of my most recent book, co-edited with Dr. David Rettinger: Cheating Academic Integrity: Lessons Learned from 30 Years of Research. Cheating academic integrity. I had to sell others on the title. It wasn’t an immediate hit. It caused people to pause. Hesitate. Wonder. But that’s exactly why I loved it. We have been cheating academic integrity for decades and that should certainly give us pause.

And by we, I mean all of us. The royal we. Parents, students, teachers at all educational levels, education administrators and leaders, journalists, our governments, and the larger society. To be sure, during two years of emergency remote inst...

            This past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend a graduation ceremony on campus.  I was excited to be there to support some of my former students and to see them walk across the stage.  The importance of this ceremony as a major transition point was highlighted by the pageantry of the event and the words of the speakers.  Students were recognized for their accomplishments and were also reminded that a bright future awaits them. 

            As a faculty member, seeing the pride (and relief!) on the faces of graduating students was very motivating.  I will even admit that there is a possibility that I became a little misty-eyed when...

It’s no secret that students face a lot of pressure to do well in college – from parents, from friends, from a theoretical future employer or grad school, and from themselves. For freshman, they’re also experiencing a new environment, facing the challenge of finding new friends, and learning how to be successful in a much more challenging setting than in high school. In the dozens of academic integrity cases I have been involved in, the cause is typically not because the student is lazy. Rather, it is because they felt pressure to do well and didn’t feel like that was possible without the actions that brought them to me.

              As teachers, we often take a “holier-than-thou” stance in regards to ...

Approximately 8 years ago, I built and launched an online College Algebra course for undergraduate students at a regional SEC University.  As I’ve continued to teach, modify, re-write, and re-design the course over the past 8 years, I’ve come to realize that promoting and maintaining high standards of academic integrity in online courses is a bit different than in my traditional in-person courses.

While it has been stated that academic integrity violations are probabilistically higher for student with lower GPA’s,  this is not absolute, and ‘good students’ cheat too (Cullen).  A 2019 study found that primarily adult students were no more likely to engage in most forms of cheati...

Last year, I had the opportunity to teach a section of College Algebra. In a conversation at the end of the semester, a student shared with me that this was the first math class in which she did not feel the need to cheat. I was a bit taken aback by her candid statement. For one thing, I was stunned that she referred to engaging an academic dishonesty so bluntly. For another, I was curious as to the reason that this class was different for her. So, I asked her why she felt that way. Her response was that she discovered that she could do the work and be successful on her own. She didn’t need to cheat because she was learning.  This, for me, was a huge statement. I wondered what had changed for this student and how could this situation be replicated f...

¿Qué es ser docente hoy en día? Hablar de la labor docente puede ser algo que todos creemos muy obvio, pero que no todo mundo entiende. La mayoría de los niños van a la escuela y conocen por primera vez a esta figura de autoridad, de confianza y de enseñanza, que los acompaña durante todo su crecimiento. Entendemos que un docente es aquella figura que está llena de conocimientos, y que a través de diferentes estrategias y metodologías didácticas, es capaz de hacerlos llegar de una manera clara, sencilla y de acuerdo al nivel del estudiante. Sin embargo, un docente va más allá de solo enseñar. Su objetivo también implica la formación de personas íntegras, puesto que el profesional de la educación trabaja con ellas. Según J.I. Goodlad:

“Si las es...

When I came to the University of Georgia as an international student from Germany in 2010, I had not heard about the concept of academic integrity or an academic honesty policy before. The only thing I had heard from a friend who had studied abroad in the United States before me was: “Be careful. The Americans are much more serious about cheating than we are.”

Of course, we were not allowed to cheat in school and university in Germany, and the consequences could have been as severe as they can be at American institutions, but I don’t remember ever having had an explicit conversation with a German teacher or professor about how to be academically honest. There was no academic honesty policy, no Office of Academic Honesty, and no official institutional process for dealing wi...