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You Be the Judge
What Do You Think?
You are invited to take a short survey about academic integrity. There is a lot of debate in academic circles about what counts as "okay" use of material and what is considered to be unethical use. This survey asks for your input as to what you think is okay in and out of the university setting.
- Rachel is creating her own MySpace profile. She is new to MySpace and to the whole idea of social networking sites, so she searches public profiles for a female who has similar demographic information and interests. She finds someone whose “About Me” really sums her up, so she copies the section, tweaks a few things, and posts it as her own “About Me.”
- Michael’s final project for his Persuasive Writing course asks him to produce a persuasive essay in either written, visual or auditory media. Michael chooses to create a video essay about gun control. He uses Google Image Search to find images from various web sites, including news sources, advertisements, and political blogs, sets them to appear in a thought-provoking order, adds background music that reflects his perspective, and adds a voice track talking about the issue. Although he creates no images or audio of his own, the final creation brings his source materials together in an entirely new way.
- Natasha just can’t come up with a good topic for her first Written Communication paper, but learns that her roommate took the course last year from a different instructor and wrote a paper for a similar assignment. Natasha edits her friend’s paper to reflect her own writing style and uses quotes from sources assigned in her own section of Written Communication.
- Eric has a hard time summarizing his own papers, but his girlfriend always understands what he is trying to say. Asked to write an essay on capitalism for his economics class, he writes the paper as required, then reads it to his girlfriend before writing his conclusion. He asks her to sum up her understanding of it, types notes as she talks, and uses these notes to form his conclusion.
- Andrew has grown up surrounded by Star Wars, and has recently taken up an interest in writing fan fiction within the online community TheForce.Net. Before posting his stories to the web site, he posts them on his blog and invites feedback. Some readers of his blog take an active interest in Andrew’s writing, providing him with substantial feedback and suggestions which he uses to revise his writing. When Andrew submits his stories to TheForce.Net for archiving, he doesn’t specifically credit this feedback.
- Simon’s Written Communication course requires him to produce a brochure in connection with his paper on a local community. Simon visits that community’s web site, downloads an image of a few community members, and places that image on the front of the brochure. He captions the image, “Community members as depicted on communitywebsite.com,” and includes the web page in his Works Cited.
- Dan is majoring in engineering and has chosen to take his required Introduction to World History course this semester. While finishing up the last few steps of a final project in traffic signal design, Dan’s system crashes; when he turns his computer back on, his careful design is all but lost. Six hours later, when he finally nears the (second) completion of his design, he realizes that he has a paper due in his history course the following day. Since his major comes first, and it’s already past midnight, he decides to purchase a paper for the history course from a popular web site, tweak it here and there to make it sound like his, and turn it in.
This semester’s scenarios are provided by one of our graduate students in English Rhetoric. Emily Adams created these as part of a research project for her thesis, and collected the survey responses herself through January 2009. She has graciously agreed that we may use her scenarios for the next few months as part of our academic honesty initiative at UAA.