The University of Alabama has a revised Academic Misconduct Policy. Under section C.1.a.(2), the policy includes an important change related to self-plagiarism, prohibiting students from “resubmitting your own previously submitted work without proper citation and permission from the current instructor to whom the original work is subsequently submitted.” See the full Academic Misconduct Policy (pdf)
Tag: cheating
Surprise! Experiential Learning Course Design Assists Academic Integrity
by Karen Hollingsworth Gardiner, College of Arts & Sciences 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 that we “add one final element to our courses” to help students connect to our coursework in “authentic ways over […]
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Living to See Another Day: Survival Through 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 without saying (but I will say it), that the consequences associated with cheating on such a high-stakes examination were severe, including the possibility of the […]
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Teaching Citations as Part of the Writing Process: Student Voices
by Lauren Fleming, Undergraduate English Major 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 like this: Friend: My professor gave me my assignment back and said the citations were wrong, but I am allowed fix them and give […]
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Solving the Patchwriting Problem, Part 1: What is Patchwriting?
by Karen Hollingsworth Gardiner, College of Arts & Sciences 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 too closely to the original text when trying to incorporate research into their writing. For instance, a student might read […]
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Plagiarism-Proof Assignment?
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 do to help students avoid the plagiarism urge. (See Tips on Assignment Writing for many practical suggestions for developing plagiarism-aware assignments). In addition to these suggestions, […]
A&S Whiteboard Event Focuses on Contract Cheating
by Karen Hollingsworth Gardiner, Academic Integrity Initiatives What is Contract Cheating? Contract cheating is the dishonest academic practice of intentionally seeking work done by someone else and submitting it as one’s own, and according to Sarah Elaine Eaton of the University of Calgary, it is on the rise across the globe — a “black market for academic work [that] is vast and little understood.” Eaton reports that a quick Google search for “Canada” and “write my essay” resulted in over […]
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