8/1/16
Constructing A Culture of Academic Integrity:
An Engagement Plan for Academic Departments
When Harvard College sophomores declare a concentration, they are claiming their academic home for the next two and a half years. Unless they change concentrations, they will forever forward be known as an English major (to everyone outside of Harvard) or a Chemistry concentrator (our term), or a Gov person, and so on. Just as the concentration becomes a part of their Harvard identity, so too do these undergraduates contribute to the character of the academic department or committee that they’ve chosen as their intellectual focus.
Concentrating is not just about amassing knowledge in a particular field, it is also about learning how that field works, what its practitioners value, and its role in the world beyond college. As concentrators, students acquire knowledge as well as learn the craft of their chosen field in our departmental tutorials, coursework, and honors projects. Students also need exposure to the values of our disciplines, those scholarly principles that we believe support the integrity of our work. This introduction to our field might be one of the most important tasks for departmental faculty. Hopefully our students are learning: what does it mean to be a historian, an artist, a biologist, or an engineer? What are the intellectual tenets of the field, what do we as scholars value, and how do we do our best work? Some of these topics, such as doing your own work, and ensuring the integrity of sources or data, cross every discipline. Others, such as how ideas from others are presented, or how collaborative projects are designed and undertaken, are particular to individual fields. In absorbing and demonstrating these standards and values, our concentrators become part of and contribute to our scholarly communities.
But this doesn’t just happen by proximity of students to senior scholars, or by including a great collaboration statement on your syllabus (although that is a very good idea!). Departments can strengthen this engagement with their fields’ scholarly standards by incorporating discussions about academic integrity into the concentration trajectory. The Committee on Academic Integrity has mapped out a series of what one of our members called “intervention points,” or “moments when concentrations interact with their concentrators.”[1]
These moments might fall into four temporal categories:
1. Joining the Concentration – Fall of Sophomore Year. When students finally decide where their academic home will be, they will be particularly receptive to the Big Ideas in your field. At Advising Fortnight events, you might talk about academic integrity in your discipline. Another particularly good moment is at declaration of/welcome to the concentration events. Faculty might talk about their own life’s work or career trajectory – why this discipline matters so much to them. Perhaps there is a presentation on seminal works that set the standard of excellence in your field. You might dive into more technical aspects of academic integrity: what does it mean to do your own work in a field where collaborative work is the standard procedure? What will it be like to work independently, or with fully electronic resources, or in a lab setting? This is the moment to set the standard that students will follow for the next two and half years.
- Discuss the Honor Code or ideas about academic integrity in your field at Advising Fortnight, Concentration Declaration, Welcome to the Department events.
- Host Faculty Conversations about their own career trajectory and life in the field – what it means to do original work in your discipline.
- Clarify resources - where should students go with questions, or to seek guidance on issues related to academic integrity?
2. Laying the Groundwork – Sophomore Tutorials/Methods.Intro Courses, Sophomore and Junior Year. The technical work often happens in required introductory courses and tutorials, and is a critical part of the larger conversation on integrity. Students who are new to our field need to learn what scaffolds good work. While all Harvard sophomores have had an excellent introduction to academic writing through the Expository Writing Program, individual fields have distinct ways of citation and collaboration, as well as advanced assignments that may not have been covered in Expos. Required courses might address questions such as: how are sources to be cited, what is appropriate collaboration in a lab/on a problem set/when coding? The lessons of Expos might be reinforced: how do you synthesize readings and use the arguments of others to build and present your own interpretation? What do you do when the pressure is on and you have a paper or a p-set or lab report due tomorrow, but are struggling to finish – what resources are available? These topics might be addressed in sophomore tutorials, required introductory courses, and advising meetings.
- Intro/Methods courses can reinforce tools of integrity for your particular field. Don’t assume that just because students have taken Expos, they have learned everything they need to know about working in your field.
- Hold extra-curricular sessions on the tools of your discipline: what are the databases or software programs that you and your colleagues use, and what are the challenges that students might encounter? Given your field’s specific methodologies, what constitutes appropriate collaboration?
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- Offer departmental-specific tours of Harvard’s libraries and collections. Students may be overwhelmed by the availability of resources at our University. Departments can host, or sessions can be offered in tutorials that are discussions about collections of sources, libraries, working in an archive.
- Reinforce where the resources are to ensure that departmental resources are available for students who struggle, or are afraid to ask the basic questions about how to do research.
3. Intellectual Growth – Content Work, Junior Year. As students delve deeper into their chosen field with content courses, lab work, and projects, they begin to find their own intellectual voice, and learn about participating in broad scholarly exchanges. How does their work talk to that of others? What will be their contribution to the field, and why does it matter that it is their own? What is the value of original, independent research? Junior seminars, or joining a lab, for example, are places where students start to contribute to the field in original ways, and offer an ideal moment for engaging with these questions. On a more pragmatic level, the research suggests that repeated exposure to the ideas of academic integrity helps to reinforce these goals. Faculty can contribute to this by reminding students of good practices when starting major assignments, and including affirmations when such work is turned in. As departments encourage courses and events to engage with the idea of integrity, students may start to connect their scholarship to real-world challenges in ways that will inform their future as citizens and citizen-leaders for our society.
- In content courses and seminars, reinforce the intellectual imperative of doing one’s own work. As students embark on significant projects, remind the of the value of their engagement with the topic, and how their work contributes to and engages with a specific field. Strong collaboration statements on syllabi are critical here.
- Student-faculty interactions such as through the Classroom to Table program are another good opportunity for such discussions.
- Consider using non-graded assignments to remove the pressure of “doing well” and to permit a deeper connection with the topic.
- Incorporate the Affirmation into major assignments and exams.
4. The Capstone – Senior Thesis or Final Projects, Senior Year. Many concentrators, even those not pursuing honors, will prepare some kind of capstone project at the end of their time here at Harvard. With the submission of these capstone projects, some students may leave your concentration forever, while others will just be embarking on a lifetime of engagement with your field through graduate study and advanced scholarship. This is not the time to start talking about academic integrity, but it is an excellent moment to jointly consider the integrity of their scholarship leading up to this culminating event. Faculty might acknowledge this by encouraging students to reflect in conversation about their development as scholars, what it means to them to have produced a substantial piece of research or writing or art. The signing of the affirmation at the submission of a paper, thesis, or final exam, is not just about saying that the student didn’t cheat. It is really a way for them to say: this is the best of my work, in this field.
- Formalize the submission of the capstone project, with events, celebration, formal Affirmations of the Honor Code, and above all, acknowledgement of the students’ original contributions to your field. Many departments already do this with theses; consider adding something for non-thesis writers.
During our discussions, it was noted that our focus was on what our faculty might teach our students – but that it may not only be students who need to reflect on the role of integrity in doing good academic work. Departments are made up of faculty, staff, and in many cases, graduate students, all contributing to our scholarly mission. In this respect, all of us who work in academia share a responsibility for creating and supporting a culture of integrity. Developing a framework of intervention points, as described here, can benefit everyone by promoting engagement with these ideas.
We encourage departments to develop their own plans for constructing a culture of integrity within their academic communities. If you have questions, or would like to talk further about academic integrity within departments, please contact Lisa Laskin, Assistant Dean for Undergraduate Education, at .
[1] These guidelines were developed by a subcommittee consisting of Professor of History Ann Blair, graduate student in Chemistry and Chemical Biology C. Rose Kennedy, and undergraduate Government concentrator Chris Farley. The idea of “intervention points” came from Chris.