Two sides of the same coin: Issues in academic integrity

Berg, Steven L

Robert A. Harris is the author of The Plagiarism Handbook: Strategies for Preventing, Detecting, and Dealing with Plagiarism.

Diane M. Waryold is the Executive Director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University.

Interview with Dr. Harris

Berg: Given the current climate in which students are often viewed as customers, and the popularity of online distance learning and hybrid internet classes, is academic fraud still a relevant issue?

Harris: I think both the customers as students and future employers are interested in degrees that have integrity since the degree helps them to get a job. Employers use the institutional degree as a measure of quality. It provides some certification of competency, maybe integrity. If students are allowed to cheat at a given institution, the degree is going to lose its value, employers won't trust the institution's graduates and students will want to go someplace else.

There is a recent case where Harvard University revoked its offer of admission to a prospective student after learning that she had plagiarized five articles for a local newspaper. Her excuse was, "Well, I didn't write those for a class." Nevertheless, Harvard took it seriously enough to revoke their offer of admission. Another way of looking at what she did is to say that plagiarism is stealing someone else's words and then lying about having written them. I don't think lying and stealing rules have been relaxed or should be. Even though the atmosphere has changed, I don't think academic fraud is becoming irrelevant.

Berg: Do you think the standards used when we were undergraduates are different for today's undergraduates? Have the standards that I was raised with 20 years ago been relaxed?

Harris: My argument would be the standards are more important than ever because we have shifted into an information economy where virtually all of the graduates of the university are going to be knowledge workers. Intellectual property considerations are extremely important now because if you steal a co-worker's idea and hand it in to the boss, that's going to have real repercussions. If you've gotten into the habit of taking other people's ideas and presenting them as your own, that's much more significant now when so many more people are working in information related jobs than there were 20 years ago.

Berg: I know from Internet searches that students find the same words on multiple pages because the paragraphs or phrases have been cut and pasted. They've also grown up with MP3 and file sharing. Do you think these activities have changed the way students regard what stealing is?

Harris: As far as intellectual property goes, yes. The whole Napster mentality, if you want to call it that, has taken over. Software copying--even before Napster, back when personal computers first became available--was so easy that it just didn't seem like stealing. The same is true with grabbing words off a Web page and dropping them into a word-processing document. It's hard to recognize as a crime. Students who would never walk out of a store with a stereo under their arm will nevertheless download music that has been stolen or copy software and so forth. That's not only a cultural phenomenon, but a matter of education. Students need to be taught that stealing is wrong, and stealing involves certain things. They need an attitude change. I agree that the atmosphere now makes plagiarism, for example, a lot more common and easier. In surveys, students report that cheating just isn't that big a deal to them. Complicating that is some anecdotal evidence that it may not be as serious to parents as it should be. One columnist I was reading recently said he's discovered that parents are more upset if they find out their child has been caught smoking than if he's been caught cheating. This is, of course, middle and high school.

Berg: That brings up the issue of high schools. What should I know about the attitudes of students who are just graduating high school? My anecdotal evidence is that their training and experiences are far different than mine were.

Harris: To go back to the atmosphere, the number one thing that college professors need to know about incoming high school students is that they think cheating is not as serious as the professors probably think it is. That needs to be laid out. Number two, many students have never done an actual research paper, at least this is true in California. I don't know how it is in other states. They don't understand how to use sources and what citations and research papers are all about, so part of the problem is a technical one that can be cured by education. The third thing that high school students have gotten used to, partly from the self-esteem movement and partly from personal experience, is they expect very mild penalties for plagiarism. In fact, I've got some quotations I can read to you from students who have talked to me.

Berg: I would be interested in hearing them, to see how they stack up against what I and other faculty members have heard.

Harris: Okay, comments that I've heard discussing plagiarism with students:

* But I listed the source in my bibliography!

* An F?? But I only copied a couple of sentences; that's such a small amount!

* I thought plagiarism meant copying a whole paper.

* It's so easy to put quotation marks in, why wouldn't I if I thought I had to?

* You'd fail a student just for leaving out the quotation marks? That's stupid!

Berg: Part of the reason I laugh is, last semester 1 had a student whose defense was, "Since you stressed academic integrity so much, why would I deliberately cheat?" I thought, since I stressed it so much, you should know what you were doing!

Harris: I have one similar to that from a student: "Knowing the penalty for plagiarism, I would be stupid to do that intentionally. So you can see it was a mistake."

Berg: I have started to realize in my own teaching that students haven't been doing as much research as I did in high school in the 70s. It came as a surprise to me that a student wasn't lying when she said she'd never done a research paper before.

Harris : I've read a couple of things about that--the high school English teachers don't want to do a lot of grading, and they don't want to grind through the whole process. So, they just read literature or something and talk about what it means. There's not too much writing instruction going on, at least not research paper writing.

Berg: I was talking to one of my colleagues about our upcoming interview, a part-time faculty member at Schoolcraft, and she said this fall she might be going back into the high school classroom full- time. What advice would you give her?

Harris: I would tell her to teach the research process. One of the things that students need to know is how to avoid plagiarism accidentally. They need to know what plagiarism is, its definition, some examples, how to cite. Especially crucial--and this is particularly important at the high-school level--is to teach how to paraphrase. Poor paraphrases are a source of a lot of plagiarism. The second thing that might be useful is to include some kind of ethical instruction, a thought experiment. There's a thought experiment in The Plagiarism Handbook1 about a guy who has his car fixed by a mechanic who cheated on his mechanic exam and made the car worse, and the guy gets in a crash and so forth. Teach students the value of doing their own work and taking their place in-taking part in-the intellectual conversation.

Berg: Since that doesn't seem to be happening at the high school level, it's something that we, as college teachers, need to be aware of, too. That brings me to an issue that you raise in The Plagiarism Handbook, which deals with problem-solving theory and the so-called "stop it" solutions. What are some methods instructors could use to combat plagiarism?

Harris: They're similar to my advice for the high school students. One is to educate them. I think 65% to 75% of plagiarism can be stopped by teaching students about plagiarism, what it is, how to paraphrase, how to quote, how to summarize. Number two-and this is probably the single best piece of advice-require printouts of the sources. If it's a Web page or a journal article, print or photocopy the whole thing. If they're citing a book, photocopy the pages actually cited. That way, you can see how well the students are working with the source and whether they have a case of quotation marks ending prematurely.

I've found quite a bit of plagiarism just by checking the source, and I'll find that the student has closed the quote, yet the following text is also from the source. Requiring printouts of the source material is a very powerful tool. A third thing is to detect plagiarism when you suspect it. Find it and punish the student. I've found that students are almost invariably surprised or even shocked when you hand them the Web source with their papers. They get the idea that the Web is this nebulous cloud of random wandering material and if they reach in and grab a piece, nobody else is going to be able to go back and find it. When you have a search engine like Google, of course, that isn't true; you can go right back and find it if they've just taken it off the general Web.

Berg: I think the quickest I ever found a plagiarized paper was about 35 seconds.

Harris: I've talked to students individually and in groups, and they're very curious about how you find a plagiarized paper, how you know a paper is plagiarized. I don't know if they want to know so they can figure a way to get around it. I just tell them, once you've graded enough papers there is what I call the "faint odor of theft," and once the red flag is raised you just do a little looking around. Low and behold, you can often find it.

Berg: Are there other things we could do, say in designing our assignments, that would make plagiarism less likely to happen?

Harris: There are a number of ways to design assignments to make plagiarism much more difficult. Assigning customized topics, requiring certain types of assignments, such as an interview or experiment or saying, "You need to have two Web sources and two articles and three books," or any kind of literal formula that makes it difficult to grab an entire paper off the Web. The second strategy is to require process steps: I want your topic today, I want a bibliography next time, I want an outline, a rough draft, the final draft so that you make sure students continue to work on the paper throughout the time allotted.

One of the biggest causes of smoke and mirrors papers is just to say, "Okay, at Week 10, I want an 8-page paper," and then you never talk about it again until the day it's due. Students suddenly remember the night before it's due that they have a big paper, and they're very tempted just to grab something off the Web. If you chop the assignment up into little pieces, encouraging them to do work along the way and giving points for each piece to make sure they're really doing it, they're much more likely to do the assignment as intended.

Berg: I could see someone objecting that giving points for each piece like that would just create a grading nightmare.

Harris: What I recommend is that they're kind of "you did it or you didn't do it" points. That is, you just look at the outlines for two seconds, say "okay" and give two points or five points or something like that. You don't have to grade every single component, and you don't have to have an enormous number of components; but you want to encourage them, reward them in some small way, for doing the pieces. I've found that students often don't have a good idea how points add up anyway. I've had students neglect a 40-point assignment to do a "one point of extra-credit" assignment, thinking that it's going to help their grade more. It's true there is more paperwork, but it doesn't create the grading burden that it might sound like at first.

Berg: Can we return briefly to the customized topic? What is an example of a customized topic?

Harris: If you say, give me a paper on any topic, the student will come back and say, "Okay, I'm going to write a paper on globalization." Obviously, the topic is so broad there are a million papers out there to find. So what you do is say, "Okay, narrow this down. Why don't you talk about the introduction of Kentucky Fried Chicken in China?" So now you've taken the student's topic, the area of interest, and you've made it specific and targeted so that there aren't a lot of papers out there on this particular item. If you want, allow students to choose their topic at a particular early date, and then you always take it and shift it in some direction. Say, "You're writing on the problem of bulimia. There's a book by so-and-so on this. Why don't you take that theory into account in the process of writing your paper?" Or, "Class, you're going to write on this. I've given you a data set I want you to include in the paper." Or, "Remember the discussion we had about concept X? Respond to those criticisms we mentioned in class." Every paper has some kind of customized, targeted aspect to it which will inhibit students from getting a pre-packaged deal somewhere on the Web, whether it's a paid-for paper or just a cut and paste job of free materials.

Berg: The last few years I've had very little difficulty with plagiarism, though last semester in my Research Methods class, it was over 20 percent. It occurred to me when reading The Plagiarism Handbook, that I had been teaching themes for the last several years and I modified the course where we still did a theme for the first paper, but the second paper I said students could do whatever they wanted. I think that was the problem-1 dropped the customization on the final paper.

Harris: Yes, the "whatever you want" is a carte blanche invitation to copy something.

Berg: The dramatic increase in cheating surprised me.

Harris: The last couple of times I've spoken to groups of faculty members, there seems to be an awareness that just in the last 12 or 18 months, there's been a kind of meteoric rise in plagiarism. It's been an issue, of course, for a long time, but it seems to have reached the tipping point, so to speak. People ask, "Is it just us? Why is this happening to our university?" I say, "No, you're not alone." Something has happened just recently-it's just gone crazy.

Berg: Do you have an idea what has caused the change?

Harris: You can say that it's the change in our culture, the change in the ethical environment, but none of those things account for the sudden, dramatic change. One of the universities I've been to gives all incoming freshmen laptop computers, so they're really a wired campus. Some ask if that causes it. But no, that school isn't different from any other. It just seems to have reached a watershed all of a sudden. I don't have a good explanation for it.

Berg: As I mentioned, last semester over 20% of my students cheated. What advice can you give me or others who are seeing a similar increase? We want to avoid a "retaliation syndrome," that is, "You cheated last semester; I'm going to get you this semester."

Harris: I think students should be put on notice at the beginning of a course. I always tell people to deliver the notice in positive terms. Say something like, "Because I value the work of students who stay up all night for four days in a row to do their own work," or "Because I value academic integrity, the punishment for plagiarism is very harsh." I don't think it's good to be negative, to say, "I'm going to get you guys. I know some of you are cheaters." I try to put a positive sense on it. I'm trying to protect the students who do their own work and who want integrity of the grade-if they get an A, they've earned an A-so here are the punishments. If students do cheat, then this is the grade the university gives.

Berg: When I speak to students about my syllabus, I ask them not to read the policies as Draconian. It's not written in that way because I think students untrustworthy, but I think I owe it to the honest students to protect them.

Harris: You could put that wording in your syllabus, too. "Because I value the integrity and hard work of good students, here are the protections I've built in to make sure that cheating is not rewarded the way that genuine work is." If you talk to really good students, they wish the punishments would be harsher. They realize the penalties protect them.

The culture now has this anti-authority tinge to it, but I think students, especially young college students just out of high school are still interested in structure. That helps them develop their individuality and continue to grow. Even though they want to be thought of as adults, they're still thankful for the appropriate guidance. Especially in an area that seems to them "squishy" like intellectual property, I think it's helpful to say, "This is the way a person with integrity would behave. This is the way a person who is harming his or her character would behave."

Berg: Do you have ideas how we can inspire professional pride in students, such that they want to present fully accredited research?

What some professors do is have an e-journal where the good essays are actually published on the Web. The counter-argument is there that you're sort of contributing to the plagiarism problem because other students will copy the good essays, but you can make that argument about anything you wanted to post on the Web.

Another thing, if you have-or can find-funds, you can do a printed form. "Here's our magazine that has the winning essays in it," and so forth. But it's something that will show students that their intellectual product has value beyond the single audience of the professor. You could have a colloquium, for example, where students are invited to read their papers to a public audience invited by the college. That just requires scheduling the room and doing a couple of flyers. It's to say that we're training students to work with information, to take part in the great conversation, to value intellectual property, that sort of thing. Sharing your ideas is one way to do it.

Another thing is simply to teach students about the value of citing sources. In Using Sources Effectively2, I make that point. Too many students think they're hurting their paper by citing the source because it's, "Oh, I had to attribute this idea to someone else." But that strengthens your own idea because it shows your idea has support. So I try to convince them that the more you cite the sources you draw upon-whether you agree with them or criticize them or modify them-shows you can engage in the world of ideas. You've got support for your own ideas or you have responses to ideas that are in conflict with yours, and there is value in that process. It's kind of a-I don't know if you want to call it consciousness raising-but it's an educational process where students need to learn that they're not just trying to get something done and out of the way. That tends to be the way they view writing a paper. "Gotta get rid of this!" instead of seeing value in the process itself, and in the product at the end of the process.

Berg: I'd like to ask about a couple of other group's roles. What would be the role of the library?

Harris: I can think of three roles. First of all is educational. Some libraries do little modules on how to use the library. They have handouts and instruction on getting the correct bibliographical information for the sources the first time. When I was an undergraduate, I had to go back and look up a lot of journals a second time because I didn't have the inclusive page numbers; I just had the page number I got the quotation from. They can also talk a little bit about plagiarism.

A second thing librarians can do is keep an eye on students as they research. If they have a computer lab in the library or if they're working with books in the library, give students advice about how to cite or quote and not plagiarize, etc. The third thing I recommend for institutions is, the library should have a plagiarism specialist. A lot of the reasons why some faculty members don't want to tackle the plagiarism problem is it is so time-consuming to run down the source and so forth. Instead, you might have a staff person in the library who gets better and better because his or her forte is to hunt down suspected plagiarism, develop evidence, take the burden off the professor and get better and better at it because that's what he or she is doing all the time. For institutions that can afford a piece of a position or a whole position, I recommend that the library do that. It's a combination of education, monitoring, and possibly detection.

Berg: A group that is not often talked about is the administration. What is their role in fostering academic integrity?

Harris: They're the ones that need to develop-in cooperation with the faculty-and establish policies, rules, procedures, penalties and especially, due process. You know, what are the steps to go through, who can appeal to whom, how much leeway the instructor has. As an aside, one of the problems we have is that students will come in and say, "Oh, I'm so sorry. It's the first time I've ever done that; please let me off the hook." The instructor will say, "I'll forgive you this time; never do it again." Then the instructor talks to other faculty and finds that the student has used the same excuse twelve other times to different faculty members. So, if the administration can create a tracking system, where a student you suspect or is convicted of plagiarism can be checked, that's important.

What are the penalties going to be? How can they be enforced uniformly? Secondly, the administration needs to support the faculty when there is conflict or disagreement; make sure the process maintains fairness and that the stated penalties are imposed justly-that faculty members don't have the rug pulled out from under them. Sometimes administrations get more interested in public relations than in upholding the rules and say, "Well, I'm sorry you caught that person copying from the Encyclopedia Britannica, but just let him off with an A minus or something and don't fail him because he's the son of a trustee." The administration is in charge of getting the "policy house" in order. And the faculty, of course, needs to play a role in that because they need to decide what penalties are fair and just and whether there are variations between natural seiences and a lab report or a humanities research paper. Do the rules need to be changed a little bit here and there? Anyway, holding the umbrella of policy and supporting the faculty is the administration's role.

Berg: Are there any final thoughts you have that we haven't already talked about?

Harris: My primary concern is education. I think that before we do anything else, we need to make sure that students know what they're supposed to do and what they're supposed to avoid doing. They need to know what a paraphrase is, for example. They need to know when they have to cite, what plagiarism is and isn't. Of course they need to know what the punishments are. Once everybody is aware of everything, then you can say, "It's okay to fail this student for the course or kick him out of the university because he was aware of the rule and chose to violate it." This isn't a case where ignorance is a factor or it was somehow inadvertent. Students have a million excuses that can only be cured by teaching them that, "Here's the way to do it and we won't accept any more excuses."

Berg: As I go into next semester, what is the single most important thing I should make sure is a part of my class as I promote academic honesty and integrity?

Harris: This is a freshman level course?

Berg: Yes.

Harris: Gosh, I'm tempted to say, use my book!

Berg: I'm going to!

Harris: I hope you'll find it useful. I'll be interested-feel free to send me feedback once you use it. The feedback I've gotten from one prof is, "Well, the students don't like it, but it really works."

Notes

1 (C)2001 Pyrczak Publishing (www.pyrczak.com).

2 Using sources effectively: Strengthening your writing and avoiding plagiarism, (C)2002 Pyrczak Publishing.

Readers may reach Dr. Harris at rharris@virtualsalt.com.

Interview with Dr. Waryold

Berg: Please tell me a bit about The Center for Academic Integrity.

Waryold: The Center is a non-profit organization, a consortium of colleges, universities and schools from across the nation and internationally. Our primary mission is to promote academic integrity in campus communities.

Berg: If I tell the president of our college that we should be a member of The Center for Academic Integrity and he asks, "Why?" How would you respond?

Waryold: Especially in times when budgets are tight, we get that question all the time. There are a number of specific services that benefit members, but aside from that, more importantly, membership to the Center would demonstrate to your campus community that academic integrity is a priority. That's what we like to sell the most. We really believe that when an institution or instructors or the president say to the constituents at that particular campus that academic integrity is important it becomes important. The very worst thing that colleges and schools can do is not to address the problem. I think it is an indication to students that we just don't care. That, in turn, gives them the rationalization that, "Well, they don't care; therefore, it's okay to cheat."

Berg: In some of the research I've been doing of late, I see it listed as a problem that students don't believe faculty members read their papers anyway, faculty members don't care whether the paper is original, so why should they bother to put in the work?

Some of the readers of our journal may be interested in what they can do in their classrooms today. What are some methods instructors can use to combat plagiarism?

Waryold: We have found that the more you form relationships with students and the more you talk about these issues, the less likely they are to plagiarize. We do have available on our web site, ten principles of academic integrity. For example, "affirm the importance of academic integrity in the classroom." In other words, talk about it. "Foster a love for learning." Many times we don't talk about how important it is to learn, rather we focus on the end product. We also have on our website tips for discouraging plagiarism, and these are from an article by two of our board members. They are very practical things like assign narrow and specific research topics, ask for them to submit their papers-drafts of each chapter-in an outline form, give written and oral quizzes, require detailed citations, things like that.

Berg: One suggestion you mention that I've seen in the literature is grading the individual components of the research process. In some ways, that seems absolutely overwhelming.

Waryold: Yes, especially in a big classroom.

Berg: Are there techniques that you're aware of to make that easier?

Waryold: Certainly you could farm it out to teaching assistants...

Berg: Not at a community college!

Waryold: Okay, not at a community college [laughter].

Berg: You mentioned building relationships with students. Is there any literature that suggests ways of doing that?

Waryold: Students are at a point where they're growing and learning and they're beginning to experience the world. I think-and this is a common sense thing-treating them with positive regard and respecting them as potential scholars, just that human decency we can all show each other does a lot to motivate students to return the favor.

Berg: Really what you're saying is not that there's something we do to build relationships around academic integrity but that we are just good teachers.

Waryold: Correct.

Berg: With that, I know sometimes professors will get burned. Last semester in my research methods class, I had about 20% of my students submit plagiarized papers or otherwise commit academic dishonesty. How do professors avoid a "retaliation syndrome" after being bitten by that kind of thing? So I don't go into next semester saying, "I'm gonna get you."

Waryold: The only thing we can do is appeal to the faculty and emphasize the fact that one bad apple doesn't spoil the whole bunch. Pardon the saying, but I think that we as educators have a responsibility, even if we are burned out, to first recognize that and to start each semester with a clean slate. Again, going back to positive regard for a student, that's what our business is. If we can't put shortcomings behind us, then perhaps it's time to be looking toward other interests. I don't know how else to put that nicely.

Berg: There may be no nice way to put that.

Waryold: No, and that's the reality of it. There are going to be students who are really a pain to work with, but then there is the majority that is an absolute delight. They're just begging to learn and grow from our guidance. That's life.

Berg: One of my plagiarists from last semester has filed a series of complaints against me, and it has taken hours this summer responding to her. Sometimes it's easy to forget she is one of ninety students, and this experience begins to overshadow the positive reaction I get from most students.

Waryold: You're right. When you're taking that much time and when your credibility is being challenged, it's a thankless response to all of your hard work, and it's hard to keep that in perspective, hard to keep the other students at the forefront of what you're all about.

Berg: I know one of the mistakes I made last semester was to say, "You just need to demonstrate you can be a good researcher and write on something." I have learned such an assignment is almost an invitation for students to cheat.

Waryold: Sadly, I think that's true. I think it's the cost of technology and access, but it's also true because some students tend to be a little bit lazy. They take the easy way out which is a societal problem as well. You're right; there are things instructors can do to create climates of learning in the classroom which really do discourage taking shortcuts.

Berg: A recent article in our local daily said that research papers are not being covered as much in high school. More importantly, attitudes toward copyright have changed. One author has suggested that because students don't see file sharing as a "crime," lifting a passage off the Internet isn't viewed as a crime, either.

Waryold: I do believe there is some credence to that. Students are from a very permissive generation when it comes to what is fair game on the Internet. There's a lot of confusion here. Students believe that if things are up on the Internet, they're free. They're out for public consumption. Of course, this belief falls very short when one considers the need to cite information that isn't your own. I do think there's confusion, almost a sense of entitlement to the information that's out there... fair game.

Berg: I cover integrity a great deal in my classes. Yet, I believed one of my students when she told me that because she'd seen identical material on multiple web sites she thought it meant she could use it in her paper without citing a source.

Waryold: Interesting.

Berg: And this was a very good student.

Waryold: Was her justification that she couldn't find the original source?

Berg: No, she really believed that seeing material on five different web sites with five different authors, meant the material was okay to use in her paper.

Waryold: I do think it creates confusion for students.

Berg: How might we work with students to help them grow as scholars?

Waryold: We need to create learning opportunities in this regard way before they come to higher education institutions. I want to make that clear first. The instruction on equity issues and the importance of proper citation when it comes to scholarship needs to begin in middle and high school-really in grammar school. When students get to the community college or other higher education institutions, we have the responsibility to provide instruction on how to properly cite sources.

It is legitimate that some students come not knowing, which is for some instructors very hard to believe, or they're confused as to how to cite sources exactly. I know that most students are technologically savvy, so taking an approach that would somehow use technology would be a first way to address the issue, whether it be a self-guided tutorial or whatever.

The second thing that's really important to them-the traditional-aged students-would be peer influence. If we could somehow involve students in a peer setup, educating other students, I think that would be very productive. At Duke University, we have an Honor Council. I happen to be the advisor to that group. It's just a bunch of students who are unique because they really believe in honor and integrity-that's what their fabric is made of-and they volunteer to educate others in the community about integrity issues. Every campus should look toward forming that type of group. It could work on a community college campus as well.

Berg: You mentioned high schools. A colleague who teaches part-time in the English department may be returning to the high school English classroom full time. What specific advice might you give her?

Waryold: The first thing I'd like to say is I admire her willingness to go to a high school to teach. It's a very difficult job. I can't thank her enough for choosing that noble profession. With that said, she will have an awesome responsibility there, clearly. A huge responsibility lies with high school teachers to help students understand the importance of scholarship, and to turn them into life-long learners, students who really like learning. In turn, they'll be good learners-not only good people, but good scholars.

There's a "cheating handbook." I don't know if you've ever seen that, but the first page includes techniques on how to cheat. The author dedicates the book to a high school teacher because the teacher-a literature teacher, I believe-made him feel he was so engaged in the learning process that he didn't want to cheat. I guess I'm saying that your colleague, your high school colleague, would also have the responsibility to create the climate in the classroom that would grab the students and engage them in the learning process so as a result, they simply would have no desire to cheat because of passion for learning as well as regard for the instructor.

Berg: There are a couple of other groups we haven't talked about who could have a role in engaging students and working on integrity. One is librarians. What do you see as the role of the librarian?

Waryold: First of all, creating awareness in both teachers and students. Helping them understand that the library is there as a resource where they can go if they have questions about scholarship, and they can learn. I believe that the librarian's roll is critical. Oftentimes, they are the frontline people interacting with students actually conducting research projects. Librarians may be able to develop a one-page summary on how to properly cite materials or help students find the different manuals that teach students how to cite properly. There is a lot that they can do to provide information and resources.

Berg: I've read studies that suggest students are afraid of showing ignorance and therefore will not use the reference desk at the library. How might librarians help students overcome that fear?

Waryold: Just putting everything online. Again, creating a very non-threatening culture, one that appeals to students' interests-which would be technology-so they can work at their own pace, with their own sense of readiness to access information available at their fingertips. The same Honor Council, not a librarian, created its own website, a student-initiated project which shows students how to properly cite resources. It shows them all kinds of different styles. I think it's very useful to students if they truly are ignorant in this regard.

Berg: I'm aware there are many different sites on the web showing how to properly cite-you were just mentioning what the Duke students did. Someone might ask, "Why should Duke students bother to do that when the information is already out there?" How would you respond?

Waryold: You mean why should Duke students take the time to create their own web site? They did it and made it interesting to fellow Duke students. I would think that any campus culture would want to do the same, would want to make it applicable to their own environment. It's so generic when it's not your own. When you don't personalize it, there's no appeal.

Berg: Moving back, one other group whom we touched on as part of a coalition earlier, is the administration. What is the administration's role in promoting academic integrity?

Waryold: The emphasis would be a shared one. We have a term in the academic integrity cohort; we call it "buy in." You have to have "buy in" from all the constituents across campus, from high-level administration all the way down to students and faculty in order for this thing to work. Academic integrity is indeed a shared responsibility and everybody needs to buy into it.

Berg: How can the administrators show support for faculty members?

Waryold: It depends on their role on campus, but there are certainly many areas on which they can collaborate and provide programmatic ideas and events in order to promote academic integrity. I mentioned very briefly that we truly believe what Robert Harris believes. He believes in prevention and that's what the Center is all about, too. We have what we call our Three Ps-Prevention, Promotion, Policing. It was coined by Larry Hinman, a person involved with the Center from the University of San Diego. We focus on the prevention and promotion versus the policing. I think the administration, of all the constituents, could really do the most in this area. Rather than emphasizing catching cheaters, promote an environment of integrity.

Berg: If I could do just one thing differently next semester, what might that be?

Waryold: Well, I don't know if you've heard of Bill Taylor, an instructor at Oakton Community College. I would say, model yourself after Bill Taylor in how he addressed academic integrity in his classroom. Basically, he wrote a letter to his students stating what academic integrity meant to him and what the expectations were for scholarship in his classroom. So, he provided the rationale for scholarship and created an opportunity for dialogue about scholarship, and in turn, actually had two or three sessions in which he discussed the letter to his students. That's how he began his class. He put aside his discipline and talked about what I perceive to be a real-life lesson, the importance of scholarship. In summary, just talk about it and make sure it is a priority. Regardless of how big or small your class is, take advantage of the teachable moment to promote an environment that embraces an honest education.

Berg: In my classes, I distribute a copy of Professor Taylor's "Letter to My Students" and we talk about it. He doesn't say, "This is what you students have to do to practice integrity." Instead, he shows that integrity is a responsibility for both faculty members and students. You have to be prepared as a student, I have to be prepared as an instructor and there's really no difference.

Waryold: Yes, it's a shared responsibility.

Berg: We're coming to the end, of our time. Let me just ask, do you have any closing comments that might be helpful to the readers?

Waryold: Just that The Center for Academic Integrity is here to help, and we hope you'll visit our web site (www.academicintegrity .org). We appreciate anyone that has an interest in integrity issues, and I hope everyone will make academic integrity a priority in the classroom.

Readers may reach Dr. Waryold at dmwaryol@duke.edu.

Steven L. Berg

Dr. Berg is an Assistant Professor of English and History at Schoolcraft College in Livonia, MIchigan.

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