Working with Your Teaching Assistants and Graduate Assistants
The Assistant's Role and Academic Integrity
Teaching Assistants and Graduate Assistants play an important role in promoting academic integrity. TAs and GAs contribute to upholding the standards of excellence expected at Ryerson whether marking assignments, evaluating group-work, or invigilating exams. TAs and GAs should know how to define plagiarism and other forms of academic misconduct, recognize when these occur, and follow the appropriate procedures. To ensure consistency and fairness, course instructors and assistants can arrange a meeting to discuss academic integrity before the course begins. One approach would be to review together the Ten Principles of Academic Integrity for Faculty. This way, everyone is on the same page right from the beginning of the course.
Ten Principles of Academic Integrity for Faculty
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Affirm the importance of academic integrity.
Institutions of higher education are dedicated to the pursuit of truth. Faculty members need to affirm that the pursuit of truth is grounded in certain core values, including diligence, civility, and honesty.
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Foster a love of learning.
A commitment to academic integrity is reinforced by high academic standards. Most students will thrive in an atmosphere where academic work is seen as challenging, relevant, useful, and fair.
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Treat students as ends in themselves.
Faculty members should treat their students as ends in themselves – deserving individual attention and consideration. Students will generally reciprocate by respecting the best values of their teachers, including a commitment to academic integrity.
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Foster an environment of trust in the classroom.
Most students are mature adults, and value an environment free of arbitrary rules and trivial assignments, where trust is earned, and given.
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Encourage student responsibility for academic integrity.
With proper guidance, students can be given significant responsibility to help promote and protect the highest standards of academic integrity. Students want to work in communities where competition is fair, integrity is respected, and cheating is punished. They understand that one of the greatest inducements to engaging in academic dishonesty is the perception that academic dishonesty is rampant.
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Clarify expectations for students.
Faculty members have primary responsibility for designing and cultivating the education environment and experience. They must clarify their expectations in advance regarding honesty in academic work, including the nature and scope of student collaboration. Most students want such guidance, and welcome it in course syllabi, carefully reviewed by their teachers in class.
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Develop fair and relevant forms of assessment.
Students expect their academic work to be fairly and fully assessed. Faculty members should use – and continuously evaluate and revise – forms of assessment that require active and creative thought, and promote learning opportunities for students
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Reduce opportunities to engage in academic dishonesty.
Prevention is a critical line of defense against academic dishonesty. Students should not be tempted or induced to engage in acts of academic dishonesty by ambiguous policies, undefined or unrealistic standards for collaboration, inadequate classroom management, or poor examination security.
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Challenge academic dishonesty when it occurs.
Students observe how faculty members behave, and what values they embrace. Faculty members who ignore or trivialize academic dishonesty send the message that the core values of academic life, and community life in general, are not worth any significant effort to enforce.
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Help define and support campus-wide academic integrity standards.
Acts of academic dishonesty by individual students can occur across artificial divisions of departments and schools. Although faculty members should be the primary role models for academic integrity, responsibility for defining, promoting, and protecting academic integrity must be a community-wide concern not only to identify repeat offenders and apply consistent due process procedures but also to affirm the shared values that make colleges and universities true communities. |
