What is Academic Integrity?
Setting a base for developing a proactive integrity teaching and learning plan begins with four key questions:
- What is originality in the realms of my course and content, student work created as part of their learning, and forms or formats selected for framing and presenting that work?
- What pathways might I follow to create integrity practices for a course - overall and at the level of individual assignments/assessments?
- What will I identify as appropriate choices and uses of technology tools - and (how) will I students identify - reflect or log or report on - their uses of technology?
- What will be my role in teaching about academic integrity practices as part of guiding students on a learning journey in which course content, disciplinary concepts, ethical practices, originally expectations, and uses as well as limitations of technology are new to them?
These starting points for reflection are more fully addressed in Thomas Tobin’s “The Online Administrator’s Semi-Painless Guide to Institution-Wide Academic Integrity,” and the comparative study “Ideal and Actual Roles of University Professors in Academic Integrity Management.” For this teaching resource, the questions serve as a reflective springboard for teacher consideration before diving into curated Academic Integrity resources addressing ways to frame academic integrity clearly, positively, and proactively.
To aid in this framing, we’ve created a companion Framing Academic Integrity webpage with curated resources that offer:
- clear, actionable definitions of academic integrity,
- resources to share with students as part of acknowledging that stress and uncertainty can prompt breaches of academic integrity,
- a selection of GenerativeAI resources to further integrity reflection, and
- links to academic integrity offices on each UMN campus.
A Sampling of Current Research
- "The relation between academic motivation and cheating." Eric M. Anderman, and Alison C. Koenka. Theory Into Practice 56, no. 2 (2017): 95-102.
- "Editorial: Artificial Intelligence is Awesome, but Good Teaching Should Always Come First." Joseph Crawford, Carmen Vallis, Jianhua Yang, Rachel Fitzgerald, Christine O'dea, and Michael Cowling. Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice 20, no. 7 (2023): 1-12.
- "Ideal and actual roles of university professors in academic integrity management: a comparative study." Debora Gottardello, and Solmaz Filiz Karabag. Studies in Higher Education 47, no. 3 (2022): 526-544.
- "ChatGPT in higher education: Considerations for academic integrity and student learning."Miriam Sullivan, Andrew Kelly, and Paul McLaughlan. Journal of Applied Learning & Teaching 6, no. 1 (2023).
- "Can negative emotions increase students’ plagiarism and cheating?." Isabeau K. Tindall, Kit Wing Fu, Kell Tremayne, and Guy J. Curtis. International Journal for Educational Integrity 17, no. 1 (2021): 25.