Creating an effective and well-followed academic integrity policy at your institution does not have to be difficult, overly legalistic, or a chore to establish. In the first post of a series on academic integrity policy, this details a process on how to establish the integrity values of your institution and a process to implement them with all stakeholders getting involved.
Step 1. Review your current academic integrity policy
Check for key descriptions of what is expected of students, faculty, and staff:
Step 2. Gather your stakeholders
Now that you have a handle on your policy, it is time to take your findings to a decently sized, diverse group. This should include faculty, administration, conduct officers, accessibility officers, and most importantly students. Members of your student government are especially helpful, as they are likely to be engaged and interested in policymaking.
Set a time for at least an hour, possibly two, to get everyone in the same room. The purpose of this meeting is to survey what your stakeholders like, what they do not like, consider any potential changes, and get their honest feedback.
Step 3. Establish a writing committee
Once you have your feedback, now is the time to get to writing. Your writing committee should continue to be as representative of your stakeholder groups as possible, but should be significantly smaller than your previous group. Too many cooks in the kitchen, as the saying goes, and this can especially be the case for writing a policy. Two or three faculty members, an engaged student, a conduct officer, a representative of upper administration, and a lawyer or someone with policy-writing experience.
Be sure to set deadlines! We all have been variously guilty of adding things to the “I will get to it later” pile and never getting to it. A successful strategy can be to have everyone on the committee conduct their own individual research and create their own notes and then meet together for a concentrated writing session. Project your draft on a screen and take turns at the keyboard editing policies and discussing them as you go. While this process can take several long sessions, it still ends up being less overall time than splitting up the work and constantly attempting to consolidate. Or worse, having one person write everything with little feedback from the rest of the group!
Your current policy is a good place to start. You may find that it may only need tweaks here and there, adding a more clear-cut process or better defining sanctions. Other times, your group may decide it needs an overhaul and a fresh start. In either case, you are never starting completely from scratch. Research and engage with other institutions (and ICAI!) on how they are doing their processes and consider asking their permission to use some of their ideas.
Step 4. Take back to stakeholders
Once your first pass is complete, it is time to take it back to your bigger group. Do not expect unanimous approval and take criticism seriously with a look to amend. Take that feedback back for another pass with your writing team, and then present back to the group for a final, more informal feedback session. While this feedback process can be onerous, it remains integral so no one is left surprised by the results or can claim to be left out of the loop.
Step 5. Implement
When you have everyone on board, now it is time to get it going! Your first stop should be the legal department of your institution for final mark-ups and their final approval and to be sent up the line through upper administration and your Board of Trustees/Regents or similar.
Once that is done, it is time to advertise. One of the biggest roadblocks to success in a new policy is a lack of awareness of its existence and a misunderstanding of what it is and does. You will especially want to earn faculty buy-in, which should have begun when you got feedback in your first big group. Speak to your faculty groups as much as possible to help encourage engagement and establish awareness of the new policy. And students need to be aware of it, too, and not just the ones that get in trouble. Make it readily available and easily accessible on a public website and advertise how to find it.
Step 6. Follow up
No policy is ever perfect. Be sure to keep tabs on the policy implementation and gather feedback over time. As before, see what is working and what is not and consider them for another update.
In the next post of this series, we will discuss different possible academic integrity policies you can implement at your institution. See you then!Creating an effective and well-followed academic integrity policy at your institution does not have to be difficult, overly legalistic, or a chore to establish. In the first post of a series on academic integrity policy, this details a process on how to establish the integrity values of your institution and a process to implement them with all stakeholders getting involved.
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