Who, me? Cheat?: An interactive academic integrity workshop
Test your knowledge about plagiarism, cheating, and academic integrity through an interactive, scenario-based forum. Panelists Elaine Fabbro (AU Library), Sarah-Jean Watt (Write Site), and Louis Svenningsen (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences) will lead a conversation on thinking ethically in tricky situations, including use of an AI paraphrasing tool. You can join in the discussion about how this topic impacts you, your peers, and the larger university community. Three scenarios will be discussed.
Scenario 1: A little robotic help
Kim is writing a philosophy paper. They have already included a number of quotations and are thinking they have too many quotations. They have a sentence they want to paraphrase in their essay, but the way it is said by the original author is so precise they cannot find another way of expressing the sentence. So, the student puts the sentence into an AI paraphrasing tool online that creates a unique paraphrase. Then the student puts the paraphrase in their essay with a couple of changes and includes a page number for reference. Is Kim violating the misconduct policy?
Scenario 2: The do-over
Joe hasn’t been in school in over two decades. He is working on his first English essay, which is a critical analysis of a short essay included in the English textbook. The textbook also includes commentary on the essay, demonstrating ways of approaching critical analysis. In his paper, he has cited the essay he is analyzing, but has also drawn on some of the additional commentary in the text. He doesn’t make a distinction in his citations between the text and the commentary, and represents the work he drew on from the commentary as his own ideas. Since all of his reference material is from the course text, he feels like it should be clear to his professor that he isn’t plagiarizing. His professor returns the paper with a note saying that he gets a zero on the assignment since he represented the text commentary as his own. He feels like since he didn’t bring in sources from outside the course text, that it is obviously unintentional and that he should be given a “do-over.” Should he get a do-over?
Scenario 3: Hit the panic button
Joan is a very busy student taking multiple courses and working full-time. She blocked time off to work on an assignment one evening and after reading the description, she is completely stuck. There’s no way she can get information from her tutor right away and she will not be able to work on this again for a week. Joan is panicking, so she decides to post on a student group on Facebook. Since she is stuck, she asks, “Does anyone have any tips for getting started on the first assignment in COURSE #?” Right away, students are posting offering her pointers like the area of the text to focus on and the additional assignment descriptions embedded in the course that are harder to find. In addition, other students are posting offering to send Joan their graded assignments via email so that she can use them to build her assignment. Now the thread is getting invitations from cheating sites who will write the assignment for her. The Facebook thread all has each student’s real name. Was Joan wrong to post online? Why or why not?