Concerning Academic Integrity

Academic Integrity—plain old honesty—is a big deal at Ashland, and I will hit the topic several times as the semester begins. (You will probably get tired of hearing me talk about it.) At least two reasons are behind my focus on this topic.

“My high school teachers didn’t care.”

I hear this one all the time. I take it to mean one of three things: the student is lying to me, the high school teacher was a fool, or (probably the most likely) the public schools didn’t have a meaningful way to enforce the rules. None of these is a good sign. Ashland University might be a tremendous change for these students. The teachers and administrators really do care here, and we do not have any obligations to keep dishonest students.

“No harm, no foul.”

We probably inherited this one from athletics: if the referee didn’t see you do it and you didn’t actually injure the other guy, everything is OK. The people who believe this one do not really understand what a university is trying to do. There is more to an English class than accumulating a pile of papers. There is more to the whole business of college than sticking a couple of letters after your name so you can get a job. We are hoping to produce educated, thoughtful young adults, and one of the main strategies is asking you to read and think about stuff—and later to write all that down. When you turn in something someone else wrote (or something an Artificial Intelligence program wrote) you have just sidestepped the whole purpose of a college. So the harm is that the student ends up with an empty head (and a heart that says cheating is OK).

The real point of this blog

Besides introducing the whole idea of Academic Integrity, I want to give you this link to the official Ashland University Academic Integrity Policy.

(For reasons which are totally opaque to me, the university changes that web address from time to time, so finding the policy statement is something of a trick. I think I caught all the places in the course where I linked to it, but if one of them misfires, come back here. I intend to keep this address updated.)