Written by Gena Dufour and Martina Faitakis

Buried deep in the “University Policies” section of every course syllabus you’ve ever read, you’ll find a very concrete reminder to students that academic dishonesty, cheating, and plagiarism simply will not be tolerated. If you’re like most students, your eyes probably politely glaze over that section, thinking to yourself, “well, I don’t cheat, so this doesn’t apply to me.” Although no one thinks it applies to them, we’ve all heard stories of students in years past who were caught plagiarizing their term papers, or smuggling notes into a mid-term. Whether or not you have been caught cheating, this article is important for all SMU students to read and to understand what academic integrity is, how it can affect you, and how you can avoid it.

Academic Integrity is an extremely important problem that many students don’t actually understand. One problem with purposeful academic dishonesty is that it can devalue honest academic work. For example, if you study diligently for all your exams, spend hours working on assignments and making sure all of your papers are cited properly, you hope that your peers are doing the same. Someone who copies another person’s work or cheats on an exam and gets a better grade than someone who does the work themselves reinforces the idea that in order to do better or get ahead it’s easiest to cheat, which is simply not true. The purpose of this article is not to expose or shame students, but simply to shed light on this issue and offer advice on how to avoid academic dishonesty.

In 2019, SMU revamped their entire academic integrity process (see the new academic calendar here, page 14). They used a “best practices” approach, brought in some consultants, and developed a new protocol to mirror previously established protocols at other Canadian universities. Previously, professors who caught issues of dishonesty had to handle them on their own. This left a lot of wiggle room and professional judgement calls, which professors were not all comfortable dealing with. These days, SMU has tightened that protocol and designated a handful of Academic Integrity Officer (AIO) positions for each Faculty (Arts, Science, Graduate Studies, Sobey’s school).This process has taken the onus off the faculty and seems to have reduced the likelihood of students “falling through the cracks.” It has also given the university a better handle on how often these issues occur. Now when a professor, staff or faculty member, or even another person or student suspects someone of academic dishonesty, they submit a report online and it is received by their department AIO. The AIO is in charge of meeting with the student to discuss the incident and decide what consequences the student will face. There are three levels to this process- if a student is on their first offence, they will typically receive a ‘0’ on the assignment or exam. If it is a student’s second offence, they will often receive an “F” in the course. If it is the students third or more offence, the student may be faced with suspension or expulsion. During this meeting, students are also encouraged to have an advocate with them. This is often a student representative from SMUSA, but can also be someone external. This meeting is meant to be an open, fair, and honest conversation between the AIO and the student. The standardization of this process has made things much smoother for academic integrity at SMU. Not only does this allow all incidents to be recorded, but it gives students an opportunity to speak up if they feel wrongfully accused.

Accidental Academic Dishonesty: A Bigger Problem Than You Realized

Accidental academic dishonesty happens more often than many of us realize. In fact, the vast majority of cases, (estimates are between half and three quarters of cases) are first offence cases wherein the student did not realize that what they were doing was considered academic dishonesty. Although most cases of ‘cheating,’ might be categorized as purposeful, a lot of plagiarism cases are actually accidents. Despite this, the repercussions for these acts can still be quite severe. Below are some scenarios of accidental plagiarism.

Working together with friends when you weren’t supposed to
Confusing “summarizing” with “shortening someone else's work”
Copying and pasting into your notes, and then forgetting those aren’t your words, or not acknowledging the source.
Patch writing. This is the act of copying a sentence from somewhere else, changing a few of the words to your own (usually with the help of thesaurus.com) and calling it your own. This might come as a surprise, but this is still plagiarism!

This trend of ‘accidental dishonesty’ is interesting because it relates a lot to what we are taught in high school, and how different the processes are in university. For instance, in high school, we were encouraged to use direct quotes, and many of us probably weren’t taught how to correctly cite something. Therefore, a little bit more education about “what constitutes cheating?” is necessary.

Many professors have acknowledged that if students took it upon themselves to better familiarize themselves with the regulations, the ‘accidental’ incidents might occur less often. However, students seldom take the time to read up on these kinds of things. This is also not to say that we think all academic dishonesty is accidental - if you borrow someone else's exam from last year, that is still cheating, and it’s easier to get caught than you might think.

Academic Dishonesty and Zoom University

Of course, academic dishonesty is still relevant now that all of our courses have moved online. You might have heard rumblings and hushed conversations about how some students see online school as a prime opportunity to cheat. This could not be further from the truth. Online courses does not mean you will not get caught cheating. In fact, since the implementation of the new protocol last year, SMU has seen about 3x the amount of reports of academic dishonesty, for all course delivery methods (as reported to Senate). So, although there are no new policies being implemented for the shift to online learning, the new protocol seems to be doing a great job at cracking down on dishonesty. In their shift to virtual operations, faculty were provided with training on how to make their courses less susceptible to academic dishonesty. This includes different kinds of assessments and lower stake assessments (assignments worth less, rather than worth a large portion of your grade). Professors and teaching assistants are also looking out for cheating more during online courses. Although academic dishonesty is obviously wrong, sometimes it occurs out of failing to understand what academic dishonesty is. Cheating in an online world manifests in different ways. For online courses, academic dishonesty can take the form of googling answers and copying/pasting exam answers, collaborating on assignments when it is not permitted, and copying others’ work. That being said, it’s important to educate yourself on what constitutes academic dishonesty so that you can avoid it at all costs.

One thing that is important to be aware of as a student is that each professor is allowed to structure their course how they please. This means that some profs WILL allow you to collaborate with others or have online open-book exams. However, the onus is on you, as the student, to know what you are allowed to or not allowed to do for each course. If you aren’t sure - ask!

How can I avoid academic dishonesty in my own work?

Lets face it, nobody wants to end up in an awkward meeting with an AIO because they got caught cheating, intentional or otherwise. But honestly, the advice “don’t cheat” isn’t going to do you any good. More helpful, we have resources available to help you learn to navigate academic integrity here at SMU.

Resources:

Get educated. Go ahead and read the Academic Regulation 18 – Academic Integrity and Student Responsibility (pages 13-16 for the undergraduate calendar and 10-13 for the graduate calendar). It’s free! If that’s a little too long and frightening, here’s the SMU academic integrity handbook
The library - The Patrick Power Library offers academic integrity workshops. They have an online module for plagiarism.
SMU Studio - this is a new resource since Virtual University started. It’s FULL of tips, tutorials, and online writing resources.
The Writing Centre- now offering virtual tutoring. This is literally their whole job! Take advantage!
SMUSA-The student association is there to help you. Here’s SMUSA’s academic integrity policy and the info right on their website. SMUSA reps are also quite familiar with the process. Recall, if you are ever in one of those situations, you have the right to ask for a SMUSA representative to come with you and look out for your best interests. SMUSA has also offered academic integrity workshops.
Ask your professors questions about this and reach out to your teaching assistants. There’s no penalty for asking about what is considered cheating or not, it might save you in the long run.
If you are faculty or a TA looking for resources, also don’t be afraid to check out Studio’s workshops on the subject or read their documents

As good, conscientious students, we know you’re probably now a little on your toes. No one wants to get caught, especially for something they didn’t even realize was cheating! But if you think that what you might be doing could be considered academic dishonesty, you can also reach out to The Writing Centre to have them take a look at your work. Remember, better to be safe than sorry!

Screenshot from the Saint Mary’s University Website

Academic Integrity and Dishonesty at SMU

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