The issue of academic honesty at St. Edward’s University is one in a state of evolution.
With the advent of easier-than-ever access to what amounts to the sum total of human knowledge, the incidences of misrepresenting the provenance of the work one submits, both accidentally and deliberately, might be assumed to be climbing. But the Department of Academic Affairs, rather than attempting to combat it by draconian punishments and severe deterrences, attempts to take a different tack.
“I’m more interested in educating than punishing, but obviously, sometimes, you do have to have penalties,” said Dr. Molly Minus, vice president of Academic Affairs at St. Edward’s University. Minus, the authority in issues of academic dishonesty, is talking about SEU’s guiding intent of trying to teach, rather than reprimand. “That’s what St. Edward’s is about,” said Minus. “It fits in with our mission.”
The approach, based around comprehensively establishing what constitutes academic dishonesty, reinforced with a thorough education in how to properly cite, attribute, paraphrase, or credit intellectual property, as the case may be, is all in service of a policy of teaching students to take the high road and to do the job right. “My teachers have definitely instilled that in our brains, that plagiarism is a no-no,” said Ava Cusack, a student at the university. “Other than that, I haven’t seen any cases where any student has been brutally reprimanded for cheating on anything.
The SEU Student Handbook states: “Representing work as your own when it is not a result of such thought and effort is a violation of our code of academic integrity.” So the efforts of the faculty are to teach students what that entails, precisely, and how to work within the framework of honest attribution that they’ll carry with them in their writing for the rest of their lives. “That’s the other piece of academic integrity policy, teaching moments,” said Minus. “We really do not want to be expelling students. We want them to stay here, we want them to graduate, we want them to learn how to write.”
“That’s the other piece of academic integrity policy, teaching moments,”- Dr. Molly Minus
The Department of Academic Affairs is currently offering a survey, carried about by the International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI), to asses the school’s overall level of academic honesty, so that the faculty and policies can better serve the student body as they grow and learn here at SEU. “How do we teach students to take the high road and do their own work, and appreciate academic integrity?” said Minus.
The survey, taken by both students and faculty, will help the department to focus its efforts on trouble spots that it might not have been aware, and to refine its responses to the issue of academic honesty to tailor a more effective and more helpful solution. ICAI, more than 20 years old, and partnered with universities in more than two dozen countries, collects data from schools all over, and helps to create solutions for issues pertaining to academic integrity in the ever-changing world, according to their website.
“I realize… that it’s possible that it’s not always caught,” said Minus, speaking about academic dishonesty. “But if it is caught, it’s difficult for the student that did it. More often than not, the student feels pretty bad about it.”
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