Academic Integrity – On-Demand Training

Strategies to Shift Student Culture and Promote Accountability

Cheating has become so pervasive, that now sometimes students don’t even realize they are cheating. Academic dishonesty is a form of theft that institutions are right to take seriously, as academic misconduct harms the cause of education and reduces the value of higher education. Responding to academic misconduct can leave faculty members and administrators emotionally drained and feeling personally undervalued by students. For their part, students who are punished without being educated about the harms that academic misconduct can cause are at risk of becoming repeat offenders, deepening the academic integrity problem on campus.

Breaking the academic misconduct cycle—which often begins in high school, where students may not be taught either the importance of doing one’s own work or the necessity of acknowledging one’s scholarly debts—requires institutions to think about how they frame academic misconduct for students and about how they can address the factors that lead to academic misconduct.

Join us to learn specific strategies you can use to reduce incidents of academic misconduct on your campus.

By taking proactive steps to engage students around questions of academic integrity during their orientation to college and repeatedly throughout their academic careers, you can help to make academic integrity a regularized practice for students. By focusing on institutional culture rather than student culpability, you will come away with practical solutions that will allow you to prevent academic misconduct, not just to respond to it when it occurs.

Topics Covered

As a result of this webinar, you will be able to:

• Frame academic integrity so that students can integrate it into their own value structures, rather than thinking about academic integrity merely as an institutional rule — break the pervasive cycle of cheating through education, support and an institutional approach to support academic integrity.
• Arm faculty members with practical anti-cheating strategies and approaches to crafting assignments and projects to reduce students’ capacities to cheat — reduce the ability or desirability for students to cheat whether they are participating in person or in a virtual classroom.
• Adopt policies that are clear, educational and address the innovative forms of potential academic misconduct that students are using today — establish institutionalized academic integrity policies that discourage misconduct and hold students accountable.
• Utilize strategies and tools to help students to identify problematic behaviors in their study habits and to find positive approaches to assignment completion that do not involve academic misconduct — create educational opportunities to respond to academic misconduct that promote student learning, avoid punitive action, and maintain the veracity of your courses and degree programs.
• Think about institutional culture and its effect on academic integrity — ensure your institution’s mission, values and academic standards are upheld.

Presenter

Dr. Lauren Bell is currently the Dean of Academic Affairs and a Professor of Political Science at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia.
Click here for full bio.