Faculty Voices: What Is Academic Integrity?

Visual: Video opens to the opening title with the video series title, Faculty Voices: Walden Talks Writing, then the title, “What is academic writing?”

Visual: The screen changes to show each speaker talking to the camera in their home offices. Each person’s name and college is listed as they speak.

Audio:

Dr. Kim Critchlow, College of Management and Technology: Academic integrity. I would define academic integrity, the long and the short of it is honesty and responsibility and scholarship. And what makes it important is that it is the foundation of university success.

Dr. Catherine Kelly, Office of Academic Support: Academic integrity is having ethical standards, being accountable and credible, and academic integrity sets a foundation for learning

Dr. Darci Harland, Riley College of Education and Leadership: Academic integrity covers a whole host of ethical issues, but I believe it is primarily giving credit to others ideas that you're communicating and building upon. So I like to think of academic integrity as kind of like a trust between two professionals. It's not just about using parenthetical citations and reference lists, but it's that trust that that a published writer has to give to those who come after them who plan on using their ideas and building new knowledge. So it's a trust issue.

Dr. Allyson Wattley Gee, College of Management and Technology: Every profession has its rules and regulations. Nurses have their code of honor, ethics--medical ethics that they have to follow, lawyers have their perspectives. As academics, we have to follow certain codes and rules in order to ensure that  our work is appropriate, that what we're doing is legal, is ethical.

Dr. Gregory Campbell, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences : I define academic integrity as a student's self-accountability as it relates to their scholarly activities and writing.

Dr. Laurel Walsh, Riley College of Education and Leadership: So academic integrity is the basic foundation for all composition in higher education. And although it's obviously become incredibly easy to plagiarize in online settings because you can highlight and copy and paste materials, the truth is the goal of all higher ed composition instruction is to help students get so comfortable with their writing that they aren't even tempted by the words and ideas of others. So, academic integrity is the upholding of a set of foundational ground rules that we've all decided together.

Visual: The video ends with the closing title with the video series title, Faculty Voices: Walden Talks Writing and the Writing Center’s e-mail address: writingsupport@mail.waldenu.edu.