by Deborah Keene, Associate Director, Blount Scholars Program How often to you check to see whether answers to your tests are available somewhere online? In the Department of Geological Sciences, several GEO 101 instructors decided that we needed to create our own test bank after we found several of our exams, with answers, online (e.g., […]
by Karen Hollingsworth Gardiner I attended my first International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI) conference in 2016. Fellow attendees repeatedly recommended James Lang’s Cheating Lessons (Harvard U P, 2013), which I found so eye-opening that the next year I applied for and became a Learning in Action Fellow. What’s the link? An explanation: Lang suggests […]
Read Moreabout Surprise! Experiential Learning Course Design Assists Academic Integrity
By Karen Hollingsworth Gardiner Did you know that the College of Arts and Sciences has an Academic Integrity Initiatives website? Did you know that it is teeming with helpful information and links on a variety of Academic Integrity issues for both faculty and students? If you haven’t visited academicintegrity.as.ua.edu, then you need to check it […]
Read Moreabout Visited the A&S Academic Integrity Website Lately?
by Alexandria Gholston, Department of English Imagine you are an Olympic athlete, and you are about to compete for your country. Imagine the pressure of having your family, friends, teammates, and your country all counting on you to represent them in front of the world. How would you handle such pressure? Would you fold, or […]
Read Moreabout Under Pressure: Four Ways to Enable Academic Integrity
by Khadeidra N. Billingsley, Department of English In Imperial China, from the 17th to the early 20th century, individuals who wanted to pursue a career in civil service were required to pass a series of rigorous exams. These tests were only offered every few years and the results could literally change people’s lives. It goes […]
Read Moreabout Living to See Another Day: Survival Through Academic Integrity
by Lauren Fleming, undergraduate major in English Why do students violate University academic integrity policies? As an English major, I began to wonder about the root of this campus-wide issue. I am often subject to the woes of my non-English-major-but-still-have-writing-assignments peers and have noticed one common denominator: interactions with quotations and citations. Often, a conversation might go […]
Read Moreabout Teaching Citations as Part of the Writing Process: Student Voices
by Karen Hollingsworth Gardiner Merriam-Webster.org, considering whether or not “patchwriting” should be added to the dictionary, suggests that the concept is a gray area, a sort of “less judgmental midpoint that can be seen as a ‘teachable moment’ rather than an all-or-nothing accusation of plagiarism.” This is especially the case with writing that is still […]
Read Moreabout Solving the Patchwriting Problem, Part 3: Teaching Paraphrasing/Avoiding Patchwriting
by Karen Hollingsworth Gardiner In her 1992 Journal of Teaching Writing article “A Plagiarism Pentimento,” Rebecca Moore Howard coined the phrase “patchwriting” to describe the student practice of “copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one-for-one synonym substitutes” (233). An example would the student who hews […]
Read Moreabout Solving the Patchwriting Problem, Part 1: What is Patchwriting?
By Karen Hollingsworth Gardiner In a previous post, “What is Patchwriting?” I included an early definition by Rebecca Moore Howard, who has continued to research and write about this issue for over twenty-five years. Her interest in plagiarism and student citation practices led her to conduct the seminal 2010-2013 Citation Project, a study of the […]
Read Moreabout Solving the Patchwriting Problem, Part 2: What IS the Patchwriting Problem?
by Karen Hollingsworth Gardiner, Academic Integrity Initatives It’s a catchy “click-bait” title: “Plagiarism-proof Assignments.” Unfortunately, it’s also a myth. There’s no such thing. If students intend to plagiarize, they will typically find a way, despite our best efforts. The good news is that most students don’t intend to plagiarize, and there are things we can […]
