Academic integrity

Academic integrity, as defined by the International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI), is a commitment by academic communities, "even in the face of adversity," to the six core values of "honesty, trust, fairness, respect, responsibility, and courage." Throughout most of the twentieth century, public outcries over academic misconduct were rare. This began to change in 1964, when sociologist William J. Bowers published Student Dishonesty and Its Control in College, which reported the results of the first large-scale survey of academic dishonesty among American college students. In the following decade, scandals surfaced involving both research integrity among academic scientists and student cheating at high-profile universities. Since then, academic institutions have devoted time and effort to fostering standards of academic integrity. Beginning in the late twentieth century and continuing during the first decades of the twenty-first, the ready availability of online resources intensified concerns that have only multiplied as technology has become more sophisticated.

Overview

Efforts to increase academic integrity usually follow evidence of violations of the academic standards of honesty and fairness. While calls for academic integrity were voiced as early as 1929, when a dean of Rutgers University emphasized the necessity for truth within the academy, the contemporary academic integrity movement began in the 1960s with the publication of Bowers's multi-institutional study. Of the more than five thousand undergraduates that Bowers surveyed, 75 percent admitted to committing at least one of thirteen distinct acts of academic dishonesty, and 51 percent admitted to committing two or more. A number of major newspapers, including the New York Times, began to report cheating and plagiarism cases at various universities.

Self-policing by student honor codes had been common, but the media response to what was perceived as a disturbing increase in academic dishonesty prompted colleges and universities to implement new policies of academic integrity. The effectiveness of honor codes in US universities came under greater scrutiny during the twenty-first century after a number of scandals, including a 2021 incident at the US Military Academy at West Point which resulted in the expulsion of eight students and led to West Point's decision to overhaul some aspects of its longstanding honor code.

Despite efforts to address cheating, the widespread adoption of the internet exponentially increased opportunities for plagiarism, and paper mills, which for decades had been offering research papers for sale, exploded with the digital revolution. In 1999, the Educational Testing Service (ETS) reported that a single website providing such papers at no cost to students averaged eighty thousand hits per day. At the time, according to the United States Census Bureau, fewer than half of all Americans between the ages of three and seventeen had a computer at home, and only about 23 percent used the internet at all, whether at home or elsewhere. By 2013, the landscape had changed dramatically: 92.2 percent of Americans under eighteen lived in a household with at least one computer, and 81.2 percent had internet access at home. This trend continued into the 2020s; by 2022, 97 percent of Americans under the age of eighteen used the internet every day.

Plagiarism and other forms of cheating were not confined to college and university students but were an increasing problem at all levels of education. In one 2009 study, more than 80 percent of college alumni admitted to engaging in some form of cheating as undergraduates. Some research supports a connection between general dishonesty and academic misconduct. Two other studies, one in 2007 and one in 2009, found that those who admitted plagiarizing or cheating on examinations were more likely to cheat on a spouse or lie to a boss than those who said they had never cheated. While student violations of academic integrity have received the most attention since the 1960s, attention to violations by faculty members and administrators has also increased. In many cases, college administrators and public school officials have been found guilty of falsifying test scores in order to increase school rankings or to protect their school’s state and federal funding, and professors and researchers at universities have been accused of plagiarizing research and publications.

In the early 2020s, the increasing sophistication of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, including chatbots such as ChatGPT, which were capable of receiving prompts and generating unique text, raised fears in the academic community that use of these technologies could lead to violations of academic integrity. While some educators saw the possible applications of these emerging technologies in a classroom setting, others were concerned that students could use such tools to write papers and other assignments for them, rather than producing work of their own. According to data published by Forbes in March 2023, a majority of US college students (51 percent) agreed that using ChatGPT and other AI tools to complete assignments constituted cheating. Many schools instituted new policies and added training for students and teachers to more effectively and ethically implement AI in the classroom. Teachers also increasingly used software to detect when students' work was generated with the use of AI; in late 2023, one survey found 78 percent of schools provided or recommended such tools to teachers.

Research indicates that the most effective means of reducing academic misconduct is to foster a culture of academic integrity that encompasses every member of the academic community. Researchers have found that cheating is contagious, in the sense that knowledge of others’ cheating is a high predictor of one's own decision to cheat. Other studies suggest that academic integrity may be similarly contagious as well.

Bibliography

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