Office of the Provost

The following statement was authored by Dr. Peter N. Stearns, Provost, and sent to the George Mason University Faculty on August 27, 2001.

The issue of academic integrity, hardly a new one, is receiving renewed attention, at George Mason and around the country. In Spring 2001, a faculty Task Force issued a thoughtful report on this issue, with a number of recommendations that we will be addressing this coming academic year.

The major conclusion of the Task Force was that large segments of both students and faculty ignore the Code's provisions. We need to remedy this. George Mason is, and will remain, an honor code university. The university maintains an active Honor Code committee, and it does take action after appropriate inquiry. And our Honor Code obligations actively involve students in the maintenance of academic integrity.

Time and change have eroded awareness of the Code, and some procedural supplements to the Code are under discussion. But the key principles remain valid: Students must be responsible for their own work, and students and faculty must take on the responsibility of dealing explicitly with violations. The tenet must be a foundation of our university culture.

A primary obligation for promoting academic integrity rests with the instructional faculty. Faculty should speak frankly to their classes about the importance of academic integrity as a basic value which underlies all teaching and learning. They need to help students understand that honestly presenting one's best work and being evaluated on that work is at the heart of learning. And faculty must act within the Honor Code and its provisions; these constitute the only University sanctioned procedure for dealing with violations of academic integrity.

Faculty should explain to students how the Honor Code applies to the assignments in their courses. For example, students are frequently confused about the extent to which collaboration is permitted. Similarly, plagiarism remains a significant problem that has been exacerbated by the use of digital tools. Faced with what Robert Boynton called the "Napsterization of knowledge" (The Washington Post, May 27, 2001, pg. B01), students seem to have the mistaken belief that anything on the internet is in the public domain and, therefore, available for the taking with digital tools. Faculty should explain to their students what plagiarism is and what they must do to avoid committing it.

A few other points deserve emphasis. First, we welcome suggestions about best practices or about ways that academic integrity can best be protected and enforced. We will be discussing academic integrity issues recurrently, as one of the functions of the new Center for Teaching Excellence.

Second, in addition to talking with students about academic integrity, I recommend that all faculty include a statement about the Honor Code on all syllabi. Many faculty, here and elsewhere, have found it desirable to require students to sign a pledge on all tests and assignments that they have complied with the provisions of the University Honor Code in their work. We also urge faculty to make students aware of any detection systems used to identify plagiarism, so they are not taken by surprise if detection occurs.

Third, we urge sensible measures to inhibit opportunities to cheat, such as developing new essay topics rather than reusing those of the recent past; or generating different sequences for multiple choice questions.

Above all, we urge appropriate balance in dealing with an undeniable problem. On the one hand, the need to prevent cheating is clear; we must be able to assure that graduating students have mastered the skills and concepts we claim they are responsible for. On the other hand, a punitive or suspicious atmosphere is not warranted, and is not conducive to good teaching. This is why academic integrity must be understood as a foundation for learning, and not just an enforcement process.

Finally, it is essential the faculty themselves set a high standard in academic integrity. We are periodically reminded that researchers and teachers do not always live up to the norms we urge on our students.

I am confident that we can confront the difficult issue of academic integrity constructively and with a sense of community purpose.