ACADEMIC INTEGRITY

Academic Integrity

Academic Integrity

Introduction

Academic integrity is an ethical issue that plays a role in both academic ethics and, generally, professional ethics. Educational institutions and educators have long believed in the importance of academic integrity, which, as defined by the Center for Academic Integrity, requires a commitment to five fundamental values: honesty, trust, fairness, respect, and responsibility (Whitley, 2008).

Academic integrity violations include misrepresenting another's ideas or work as one's own; falsifying research data; misappropriation of institutional resources; fraudulently advancing one's own academic standing; and disrupting the academic environment of others, such as through hoarding or damaging educational materials. Although these issues have always concerned educational institutions and educators, distributed learning technologies have changed the patterns of academic dishonesty (Cizek, 2008). The most common form of academic dishonesty, plagiarism, is facilitated by the access to virtually unlimited data, the difficulty faculty have in knowing all of that data, and the ease of cut and paste commands. Moreover, the technology culture supports the belief that “information is free” regardless of regulations that apply to material (Callahan, 2004).

Discussion

The early Internet notion that technically possible behavior is permitted behavior persists. As a result, many individuals who would never steal a CD from a music store not only freely copy that same CD from an online site, but also insist the behavior is ethical and not equivalent to stealing or, more specifically, copyright infringement (Bandura, 2006). In the same problematic way, it may feel different to a student to execute the cut and paste commands than to copy another's work by long hand or to retype it. Technology removes the physical labor that serves as a reminder of authorship and ownership. The ease of technology-facilitated academic dishonesty may require institutions and faculty to take a different approach to academic integrity issues, particularly in the educational efforts designed to address these issues (Anderman, 2007).

Strategies for Promoting Academic Integrity

There are many ways that faculty, administrators, and institutions as a whole have attempted to address the problem of academic cheating in their classrooms or on their campuses. Many focus on the prevention and detection of cheating, but others have taken a somewhat different approach: the promotion of academic integrity. Although the promotion of academic integrity could be construed as a method of prevention, it is much more than that (Whitley, 2008). Efforts to foster academic integrity, which are done most effectively at institutions with honor codes or ...