MENU

Talking About Academic Integrity

TILT Master Teacher Initiative

The Master Teacher Initiative (MTI) is a university-wide program to enhance the quality of teaching within CSU’s colleges and libraries.

Visit TILT’s collection of Teaching Tips and the CNS collection of Teaching Tips

November 11, 2024

Wow, we are in week 13!  Next week is the last week before fall break (I am sorry if that stresses you out).  The AAAS/NSF S-STEM Rec annual conference in Chicago was good.  Five CSU W2R Scholars attended their first scientific meeting and by all accounts had a great experience.  The teaching tip this week is a Chronicle of Higher Ed article by Beth McMurtrie.  Before that I provide a public service announcement.

Writing in the Sciences: A Preprint Peer Review Curriculum – workshop

Department of Biology | Graduate Degree Program in Ecology

Event Categories: Community Engaged Learning and Community of Practice

Scholarly peer review is an integral component of the scientific process and central to the identity of a scientist, yet it is rarely integrated into undergraduate and graduate science education. Explicit instruction on peer review has the potential to not only increase students’ science literacy, identity, and belonging but also demonstrate to students the practices of science professionals.

Learning outcome 1) Consider the impact of a preprint peer review curriculum on students’ scientific literacy, identity, and belonging.

Learning outcome 2) Create a framework for implementing a preprint peer review curriculum into course structure.

Talking about academic integrity

Teaching Chronicle of Higher Education

Beth McMurtrie

November 7, 2024

Subject: Teaching: When cheating feels like it’s everywhere, what can you do?

In my latest story I looked at the issue of cheating: why students do it and what could be done to mitigate it. And while I discussed ChatGPT abuse, which is plaguing a lot of classrooms, I dug deeper into what motivates students to cheat in the first place.

I began reporting this story because I was struck by something happening at Middlebury College with its honor code. It turns out that the code doesn’t really have a meaningful impact on many students’ lives anymore. An annual survey done by the campus newspaper showed this year that the percentage of Middlebury students who admitted violating the honor code jumped to 65 percent, up from 35 percent back in 2019.

An honor code review committee has been studying the issue and what they found will likely resonate with many readers. Students feel pressure to get A’s even if that means cheating to get the grade. Cheating is relatively easy to do, through AI and — something specific to Middlebury’s honor code — unproctored exams. And then, of course, when people around you cheat, you feel pressure to do so as well, just to keep up.

Academic-integrity researchers, along with faculty members I spoke to on other campuses, also talked about the constraints students are under when juggling work and a full class load. And how so much of college feels, to students, like busy work and thus they have fewer qualms about cheating. I hope you have a chance to read the story, which digs into all of these issues in more detail. But if you’re short on time, here are the big takeaways:

Students have always cheated, and it’s often for situational reasons (not all students, of course, but many). They do not see it as a moral issue. But while the reasons for cheating haven’t changed, the pressures that lead to cheating and the ease of being able to cheat have increased.

Professors often don’t report cheating because they don’t feel like it’s worth the hassle to go through the process, and they worry either that nothing will come of it, or that the student might be overly penalized.

Colleges don’t discuss academic integrity and why it matters in a consistent way, whether that’s through classroom conversations or the campus as a whole. As a result, academic integrity remains somewhat abstract and aspirational rather than becoming a lived experience.

I want to leave you with some thoughts from one Middlebury professor I spoke to, whose comments did not make it into the story. Emily Proctor is a professor of mathematics and statistics. She’s thought a lot about how to make her assignments and assessments less cheatable, but she also spends time talking to students about academic integrity.

In those conversations, Proctor doesn’t discount the fact that grades matter a lot to students, and she believes that to talk only about the value of learning for learning’s sake would be disingenuous. She also talks about how disheartening it is for professors when their students cheat. But she spends time, too, encouraging her students to think more broadly about why they’re in the class, what their goals are, and why she thinks the honor code is a good thing. “Usually the words I use are, I believe in the honor code…even though I know there are challenges with it right now.”

She finds that that dual approach: acknowledging that grades are very important to students, but that academic integrity is integral to successful teaching and learning, has allowed for students to open up and trust her so they will “show [her] the places where they are not perfect and are struggling.” Some students have even sought her out to talk about academic-integrity issues and ask questions about different scenarios.

Proctor is hopeful that Middlebury will use this honor-code review as a teaching moment similar, she says, to what happened after a controversial political scientist, Charles Murray, came to campus in 2017 only to have his talk shut down by protestors. Out of that challenging situation, she says, “grew an entire movement on our campus to learn how to transform conflict in a very healthy way.” Could the same be true of the honor-code review, she wonders, in that it might begin a broader discussion on what it means to live an honorable life?

Her thoughts make me wonder whether the challenges around generative AI could spark something similar on other campuses. Could this moment give colleges an opening to have frank discussions with students about the importance and meaning of authentic learning? And could professors encourage students to speak honestly about why they are in college and, in turn, explain to students why they believe what they are teaching holds value?

Let me know your thoughts. Have you taken a stance in your classroom to address cheating head on, whether it’s talking to students about academic integrity, changing how you teach, or reporting students who violate the rules? And if so, how is that working? Write to me at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com with your story, and your experience may appear in a future newsletter.

Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com or beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.

For context, according to Joseph Brown, the CSU Academic Integrity Director, the system we have at CSU is considered a Modified Honor Code System. It retains the hallmarks of a Traditional Honor Code system (honor pledge, education for students on academic integrity, etc.), but differs in one exceptionally important respect: how cases of academic misconduct are adjudicated. Academic misconduct cases in our system (Modified Honor Code System) are adjudicated by an administrative professional [in the Student Resolution Center] designated by the university. In traditional honor systems, those cases are decided by a student-led process, usually a panel.

He doesn’t know why this system was adopted by CSU or if faculty had input. I can tell you that the research on academic misconduct (going back to the early work by Donald McCabe, Gary Pavela, and Linda Trevino) has established that the system that produces the best outcomes for dissuading/ preventing academic misconduct is the Traditional Honor Code system. See also: Schwartz, Tatum, and Hageman, “College Students’ Perceptions of and Responses to Cheating at Traditional, Modified, and Non-Honor System Institutions” (2013). However, Traditional Honor systems require greater levels of support, management, and resources simply to make sure they run. If you think about it, that’s fairly straightforward. Students must be selected, trained, scheduled (for hearings), and supported. Virginia Tech and Texas A&M are notable systems who have balanced the requirements of those systems with the need to resolve incidents in a timely manner for faculty. Modified systems produce less desirable outcomes for students, but they do serve the institution in one important aspect: resolving incidents efficiently. If he had to guess, this probably explains why we have the system we have.

I feel this tip is timely as we move into the end of the fall semester when many assignments are due and many of you are grading.  I hope you find these posts helpful for your teaching.  As always, I appreciate your questions, comments and feedback on this and other teaching related topics.

Cheers, Paul