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NEWS
| October 15, 2004
Student Services
Academic Integrity Week debuts at
UTA
Training sessions augment information
in the weeklong focus on scholastic honesty
By Marti
Harvey
The Shorthorn Staff
To highlight issues surrounding cheating and plagiarism, the Office
of Student Judicial Affairs will sponsor Academic Integrity Week
with daily events beginning Monday.
President James Spaniolo and other university officials will kick
off the series with an address to students. Events for the rest
of the week include speakers, citation workshops, a debate and a
free screening of “The Perfect Score,” a recently released
film about the SAT. Students can also take the “Stop Plagiarism
Tutorial” to test their knowledge of what constitutes plagiarism.
The office handles student code of conduct violations such as cheating,
hazing and drug possession or use.
“Some other schools have these events, but we had not,”
said Judicial affairs coordinator Tami Tucker. “We looked
at it as another way to promote integrity within the university
community.”
Business junior Blake Campbell said highlighting academic integrity
is a great idea. He said he has no respect for cheaters, but sometimes
cheating is not so clear-cut.
“I’ve never cheated in school, but I know a lot of people
who have,” Campbell said. “They don’t usually
get caught, but sometimes they don’t know what they did was
wrong.”
Campbell recalled a friend who had no idea cutting and pasting from
the Internet was cheating.
“He thought he was doing the research, so it was okay to show
what he had found,” Campbell said. “But some people
do it on purpose and they don’t have a conscience when it
comes to cheating.”
Tucker said she doesn’t believe cheating is an epidemic.
“We just want to let students and staff know how seriously
we take it,” she said. “After we give everyone the right
information, it’s up to them to make the right decisions.”
Nursing sophomore Janna Englund said she heard of cheating issue
in the School of Nursing last year. “Our professors made sure
we knew about cheating after that,” she said. “We were
way more aware once the word got out.”
Tucker said scholastic dishonesty is the number one reason for disciplinary
actions taken by the university. During the 2002-2003 school year,
201 cheating violations required some type of disciplinary procedure,
but in 2003-2004 that number dropped to 179.
Penalties can range from a written warning to expulsion.
The Center for Academic Integrity, a national consortium of over
300 institutions, says about 75 percent of students have cheated
at one time or another.
“Although the numbers are big, we believe that once people
realize what they’ve done is wrong, they won’t do it
again,” Tucker said. “We just want to reinforce that.”
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