If you are a student who basically is trying to do the right thing in my class you should be OK even if you do something I consider to be academically dishonest and you had not thought of it that way (even after reading this page), or if you err in a way that makes you look like you were dishonest when that was not the intention. Usually we can talk through these things, especially if you have established a relationship with me. However students in my classes do cheat at times and even some of my dearest students have done so. So please forgive me if I show some measured caution with regard to this issue. If I have concerns, I'll contact you except for some unusual circumstances where I will act on my own. If I do contact you, please speak honestly with me—if you have cheated that means full disclosure not bits and pieces of information and if you haven't that means just telling me that. If I determine that I will need to submit a report to the University of academic dishonesty, the form looks like this: FACULTY DISPOSITION FOR ACADEMIC DISHONESTY.
I have two primary roles: to teach, and to represent students' performances to the outside world. Academic dishonesty subverts both of these roles.
First, academic honesty is never about just the incurring student and me. Academic dishonesty affects how I deal with all students and continually forces me to design teaching plans and materials in a way that reduces a student's opportunity to cheat. This is a burden in terms of time and narrows the options I have for interesting teaching procedures. Academic dishonesty breaks down trust and sometimes students deserving of trust do not get the benefit of it because of the actions of someone perhaps even in another class in a different year. In other words, each act of cheating that I encounter has a ripple effect in terms of class rules, class approach, and my general interaction with students. This probably isn't viewed as very important to the student who intends to cheat. I mention it because it explains why I try so hard to preempt the act in the first place. I don't enjoy catching or prosecuting cheating students.
Second, I want to be viewed as honest, credible and reliable. It is part of my professional persona. Among other things, I am expected to obtain a fair measure of a students ability, and make a record of that ability, so that others can rely on it. I want others to view the grades I assign to be as close as possible to what the student can actually do ... on their own.
Finally, very simply put, honesty is personally super important to me. I'm just that sort of person and students share a space with me for a while. This means a lot of things, including my desire to support other honest students by making it possible for them to feel they don't have to cheat or simply to shield them to some degree from the unpleasant experience of being ranked the same as someone who did not do the work but cheated his or her way to the same grade. I want to reward work and send a signal that this is the only way to a good grade in my classes.
I think the most common out-of-bounds activity for my students is group work when I expect individual work. An extension of this is "group" work where the individual is letting other members of the group do most of the work. And extreme example of this is when a "friend" helps to edit an essay or an essay is custom ordered for a fee. But, for me, just about the worst sort of academic dishonesty that occurs in my classes is when someone pressures a "friend" to do the work for him or her. Please note that, in order to reduce the number of occurrences of this, in this case I consider both the asker and the giver to be guilty parties, and will prosecute both.
The second most common form of academic dishonesty is a misrepresentation of ideas within a written assignment as one's own, when they are not—plagiarism. Unfortunately, whether intentional or not, the dishonest representation stands apart from that, so it is good to be extra careful. Here are my guidelines:
"Context is king" — What isn't plagiarism in one circumstance is in another. For example, let's say that I impersonate Sarah Palin as a stand up comedy routine and get paid for that. There isn't anything dishonest going on. But let's say that I impersonate Sara Palin over the phone to a reporter, letting him or her assume that I am the real person. And I say things that hurt her reputation. That's wrong. What is a laugh in one case is illegal in the other. Only the context has changed. In our case, the context is the assignment or the place in the assignment where you present an idea. If that context naturally suggests it is your idea (such as a response paragraph to a reading assignment) when it isn't, that's academic dishonesty. This can be subtle: let's say you've borrowed a couple of ideas from an author. You write two long sentences, footnoting at the end of the second sentence. Depending on how you write those sentences, the reader might assume that the footnote is meant to refer to the both or probably just the last one. If the context (how you phrased things) naturally suggests that the footnote is for one sentence only, you've plagiarized. Manage your contexts and err on the side of clarity by using phrases such as "McCullough claims .... . Later she also claims ... (footnote)." Beware of paraphrasing—it is useful but oh so easy to slip into making is sound like your thoughts. Develop self-awareness during this writing mode and avoid fooling yourself, or others, that it is your idea. Footnote it. Of course putting something in quotation marks and citing it is rock solid in terms of clarity but a lot of times direct quotes are not as effective as paraphrasing. If the reader, based on a natural and reasonable response to your context, assumes that an idea is yours when it isn't (even in cases where you sandwich between two sentences that are your ideas a third sentence that is a cut-and-paste from somewhere), you've plagiarized. Context is king. You can avoid this error by taking good notes, remembering the source of your ideas, and rereading your work from this one perspective: "Will the reader understand easily and unambiguously which ideas are mine and which come from outside sources?" Since I cannot determine whether you intentionally plagiarized or not, I act on the fact of it, not on my best guess of your intentions. Proceed with care. It isn't that hard to avoid the problem.
"Over the shoulder rule" — If the author your are paraphrasing could look over your shoulder and comment, "Yes, that is a good representation of what I was trying to say" then you have been fair and accurate. To not meet this standard usually isn't dishonest, it is just sloppy work or weak reading that hurts your credibility. If your assignment were a public document it might also hurt the reputation of the author and s/he could rightly take action against you. But that isn't our situation. Our situation is me trying to evaluate your work. When you misrepresent someone your credibility crashes through the floor since now I will wonder if you understood anything that you read for your assignment. Quoting out of context is a favorite rhetorical move of students, to support their arguments. It doesn't meet the "over the shoulder rule" standard, obviously. I encounter this now and then but mostly I encounter a large percentage of students who have not read their secondary sources carefully enough. Either they read a limited area of text or they read more fully but didn't understand what they were reading.
In most cases, place footnotes at the end of the sentence after the punctuation:
"Mary had a little lamb."<fn marker here, citing the poem and the source of it>
In some cases it is better to put the footnote at the end of the clause:
"I'm no crook" <fn here giving the date and circumstances of Nixon's comment> became a popular tag line in stand-up comedy in the late 1970s. <if you put the fn here, it would suggest that the second half of the sentence is an authority that you are quoting, not your own opinion>
And in some cases it is better to put it after the term or phrase:
He was considered a "little lamb" <fn: a phrase meaning a weak-willed person that was used by street gangs in Algeria in the 1940s> by most of the criminal world.
For goodness sake, make sure the footnote is 100% accurate in its bibliographic details and location. In nearly all cases the footnote should point to a single page. Now and then a few pages are appropriate:
Colin's argument about faith in his early work was subtly different than how he made the argument in his final major essay. <fn a range of several pages identifying the location of the argument>
I learned early on that those who cheat test boundaries then, if caught, apologize profusely and politely and expect to walk away from the event without any consequences. This wasted an enormous amount of my time. To protect my own working environment, I was therefore forced into taking the much less friendly "punish on first offense" position. Once I did so, though, cheating in my classroom dropped by 60-80%, I think (—it's hard to tell, of course). This Web page states some my expectations. (Obvious things like stealing answers during an exam have gone unmentioned.) While that is good for you, it also subverts any excuses that might be made by someone who does cheat that s/he didn't understand my policy.
My usual response to academic dishonesty, when discovered, is to fail the student on the assignment and retroactively fail the student on any prior assignment in the same category that was subject to the same possible cheating technique (or at least carefully review the material) and, usually, no longer accept from that student future submissions in that assignment category since s/he could once again cheat. (About half of the students who promise me, often tearfully, that they will never cheat again do indeed cheat again, sometimes in the very next week.) I make the assumption that the cheating has been going on all semester and I just happened to finally catch it. I rarely give the student a chance to redo the work since that just creates more work for me. In more severe cases I report the student to the University. As a practical matter, I find that most students whom I catch cheating drop the class. Now and then, given the timing of the cheating and the size of relevance of the assignment, I might give the student an "F" for the course but I prefer to report to the University. If it is to happen, it usually involves cheating on the final assignment of the course, typically the essay. Reporting the student protects other instructors whereas the "F" can mean either "didn't do the work sufficiently" or "cheated"—I don't like that ambiguity.
Here's the link to the earlier version of this academic honesty page. It is quite long but has some interesting examples of plagiarism, ponders issues, makes extensive comments about footnotes, etc. It has a hyper-linked TOC. Go here: Academic Honesty Page Pre-2013