ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Elise Ferer, Humanities Liaison Librarian at Dickinson College.
When I was in library school I did not see clear links between my role as a librarian and promoting academic integrity on campus. I knew plagiarism was bad (who doesn’t?), but what could a librarian do about it besides teaching how to cite properly?
As a new librarian at my institution I was asked to work on the annual report on our online academic integrity tutorial that all incoming students are required to complete. After spending time with the tutorial thinking about it and seeing the data we were collecting, I began to notice some of its inherent flaws and welcomed the chance to improve and refresh the tutorial during the 2012-2013 academic year. While it is still not perfect, I think we have begun to address some of the problems with how academic integrity is addressed on college campuses today and shift the focus from one of blame to responsibility for one’s actions.
When we were starting to discuss how to revise the tutorial, my partner on the project brought up the idea of shifting the focus, from an accusatory nature that concentrates on complying to rules and negative consequences to a tone that emphasizes the personal responsibility and the integrity that students should possess or develop as part of the privilege of attending college. It did not take much argument on her part to convince me that this was a good idea, as my personal philosophy is to treat students like adults with real responsibilities to uphold. In shifting the tone of the tutorial we were trying to appeal to students’ moral responsibility and hopefully their desire to ultimately do the right thing. We also acknowledged that students are adults and can make cogent choices, and remind them throughout the tutorial of the reasons they should make sound moral choices.
Ultimately, why is this important? Why should we try to create integrity in our student body and not just present the consequences as a deterrent? As much as plagiarism and citing sources are within the realm of academia, once students enter the workforce they will have opportunities to act ethically or to take the work of others and cheat to get ahead. They should be held to an ethical standard as college students in the hope that these skills will follow them in their career or to the next step in their education. In my mind, it is better to give a tangible, positive reason to do the right thing rather than threatening students with consequences that only exist within the walls of our college. The academic integrity we are trying to instill also ties into standard five of the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education which state that students should understand the “economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information.”
It is often said that when we raise our expectations for students in the classroom they will rise to meet us. I prefer to be optimistic and believe that students will respond positively to these tactics. I think we are doing a disservice to our students by assuming they will cheat or plagiarize; I like to believe they are innocent until proven guilty. Even the previous title of our tutorial (I Thought I Could Get Away with It…) placed assumption that students would take the easy way out and do the wrong thing.
Personally, academic integrity was not an active interest until I started exploring our community standards, other tutorials, and started working to make our tutorial more engaging and interesting to students. There is still work to be done in this area, but there are some amazing resources out there (like this video from Norway), and while some students still maintain they learned all of this in high school, there are still areas that bear repeating. Academic integrity, citation practices, and plagiarism are all sticky subjects, and we all want students to do the right thing both at our college and long after they leave us.