The Integrity Blog

The Integrity Blog explores timely issues regarding honesty, responsibility, and fairness in academic settings. Every day institutions of higher education face ethical and moral challenges. This blog both acknowledges the current environment and offers students an opportunity to discuss these dilemmas in an effort to promote integrity here at the University at Buffalo.

Tips to Manage Stress While Maintaining Academic Integrity (October 2021)

Written by Grace VerWeire, Student Integrity Ambassador
Edited by Jeremy Raymore, Graduate Assistant

The beginning of the semester has surely come to an end as we enter our sixth week of the academic year! Fortunately for some, this means getting into a routine and building a schedule that can help them stay on track. However, it can be hard and sometimes even seem impossible for some students to come up with a comprehensive plan or schedule for the semester. It can be a daunting task: sitting down, pulling up countless emails, syllabi, and to-do lists of homework assignments and exams. Sometimes, this can lead students to become disorganized and miss out on important deadlines. The path of procrastination can lead students down a path of academic dishonesty as well.

When a student is faced with the challenge of a rapidly approaching deadline, sometimes it can seem tempting to text a friend and ask for their homework answers or even purchase the assignment online. But one thing that students who fall victim to this behavior forget is the consequences that can follow it. Although it may seem harmless to copy a few answers from a friend, the truth is that you miss out on the practice that you need in order to achieve an honest degree. Your professors assign homework and readings in order to prepare you for not only upcoming classes, but your future career. Missing out on this preparation can be detrimental to your future. Also, by submitting someone else’s work, you’re not only putting yourself at risk of getting sanctioned, but your friend as well.

Here are a few personal habits you can practice to protect yourself from ending up in these situations and maintain your personal integrity:

Make a list. It may seem silly to think that lists can help prevent you from missing huge deadlines, but the act of writing something down, or even typing it, can help cement it in your mind and allow you to remember it better. Also, by making a list, you can see all of your tasks laid out in front of you. This allows you to re-order them, move things around, and check them off as you complete them. Nothing feels better than crossing off to-do list items!
Use a buddy system. You might not realize it, but your friends could be struggling with the same things as you are! Reach out to a friend, roommate or classmate to see if you can rely on one another to remind each other of the things you have to get done for your classes. Communicate with one another and reach out when you need help keeping your thoughts or tasks organized. You could also study in the same space so you both stay on task, also known as body doubling. Just make sure your work is your own.
Focus on only one thing. Sometimes when we have a lot to do, we tend to jump from one thing to another in order to get multiple things done at once. It’s best to avoid this situation; multitasking can not only lead to things not getting done, but can also lead to incredible levels of stress and even disorganization in the long run. Choose one task and focus only on that before moving to the next thing in order to stay on track and succeed.

There are many other ways to reduce the chances of you ending up in a situation where academic dishonesty could be at play. By staying organized, focused, and level-headed, anything is possible in your academic career. Remember, honesty is always the best policy! If you are facing burnout, communicate with your professors and see if together you can make a plan to get back on your feet with integrity.

Check out the Office of Academic Integrity’s student resources page for resources to help you stay on top of your studies, or take a look at the following external resources:

One year later and we're still here. (March 2021)

Kennedy Alexis, Graduate Student, Urban Planning, Class of 2021

So, it’s officially been a year since COVID-19 impacted the academic experience of us all. The transition to virtual learning caused us all lots of stress including Zoom fatigue, decreased privacy from living back at home with family, and the overall feeling of having no outlet to relax and de-stress because the spaces, once available to us, have all been closed. Like many of you, the stress and overload by our circumstances has left me feeling overwhelmed at times. I often felt depressed or anxious, and would question my path, as life wasn’t the same anymore. As the graduate assistant in the Office of Academic Integrity, I saw how this impacted the academic choices of many students at UB. Students did not know how to manage their feelings and often experienced difficulty accessing and expressing their needs for help to professors and teaching assistants. This led many students to use unacceptable resources for class assistance and/or participate in class group chats, both of which caused numerous instances of cheating over the past two semesters. In this post, I want to talk, not about cheating, but about what we should do in times where we experience adversity during our academic careers.

A tool that I’ve adopted during the pandemic to combat stress and overload is mindfulness. Mindfulness is the state of being aware or conscious of something. It is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us (mindful.org, 2020). Research shows that “mindfulness practice decreases stress and anxiety, increases attention, improves interpersonal relationships, [and] strengthens compassion” for students (Mindfulness Schools, 2021). An example of where mindfulness can be helpful would be when you’re stressed during finals week. The back-to-back exams and projects that is finals week can make us feel overwhelmed and anxious; mindfulness can help us take deep breaths and develop perspective to calm our busy minds. For example, through mindfulness one may learn that the pressure to receive an A on an exam is what’s causing them stress. Through further practice a student may realize that an A on the exam is not a representation of their intellectual abilities, because their abilities were shown throughout the entire semester. This realization can help calm the mind of a very anxious student.

In the Office of Academic Integrity, we understand that the role of a college student is inherently very stressful as students have to manage classes, stay involved in campus activities, and participate in work experiences. Although life may be stressful, committing acts of academic dishonesty is never the best solution for dealing with stress. In actuality, getting caught cheating adds another layer of stress and always leads to more serious consequences than doing poorly on one assignment. We want students to know there are free resources available to help them deal with stress; one resource is UB’s Counseling Services. The Counseling Services department offers self-help resources that teach students strategies for relaxation and de-stressing. UB’s Student Life Gateway is another resource which offers stress management and prevention resources to students. Lastly, the Graduate School has compiled a list of health and wellness resources, both on- and off-campus. For the rest of the semester, I challenge students to practice mindfulness, breathe, and do their best, especially in times of adversity.

Sources

“What Is Mindfulness?” Mindful, 8 July 2020, https://www.mindful.org/what-is-mindfulness.

“Research on Mindfulness.” Mindful Schools, 26 Aug. 2019, https://www.mindfulschools.org/about-mindfulness/research-on-mindfulness.

"Our goal was to emulate, not imitate." (November 2020)

Kennedy Alexis, Graduate Student, Urban Planning, Class of 2021

On Sept. 3, 2020, William & Mary College published a letter announcing that the college will be cutting seven athletic programs after the 2020-21 academic year. In this letter, William & Mary explains that the costs associated with sponsoring these Division I programs have grown dramatically over time and have become unsustainable. The letter further explains that the COVID-19 pandemic “has made [the] budget constraints acute and has brought [the university] to a point of reckoning” (William and Mary, 2020). Many universities across the United States took similar approaches to alleviating their increased financial burdens inflicted upon them due to the Coronavirus. This is not what brought William and Mary College to media headlines; it was that many sections of this letter were found to be plagiarized from an announcement made by Stanford University on July 8 about cutting 11 of their teams. Braden Keith from swimsman.com released images that highlight obvious parallels between the two documents.

In her Sept. 18, 2020, statement, Athletic Director Samantha Huge stated that it was her staff’s goal to “emulate best practices, not imitate” and that they “should have taken more care with the review of the materials shared”. The William & Mary Honor Code defines plagiarism as the “the presentation, with intent to deceive, or with disregard for proper scholarly procedures of a significant scope, of any information, ideas or phrasing of another as if they were one’s own without giving appropriate credit to the original source.” Following this definition, it is a bit difficult to understand that their goal was to emulate best practices when no credit was given to the institution whose best practices they were emulating. Huge, who holds a Juris Doctorate from Campbell University, has stopped working at William & Mary since October, but in her departure, she left a negative impact on the William & Mary reputation and her own.

As a student, the policies regarding academic integrity often feel biased as there are many formal processes that keep students accountable for their acts of academic misconduct, but very little or no processes that keep professors or administrators accountable for their actions. Students too often feel the consequences of academic punishment and to some extent it is warranted, as we are the ones preparing for our careers; but where is the accountability for professors and administrators who are in their careers? I think the William & Mary case shows us that there is a need for processes that also hold professors and administrators accountable. It seems that one stepping down from their position is the standard repercussion, but where is the lesson learned? At UB, students go through remediation to learn from their mistakes and understand how their acts of academic misconduct affect different people in their lives. When Samantha Huge stepped down, did she learn how her actions may have impacted students? I highly doubt it.

When students see acts of academic misconduct performed by professors and administrators it makes it difficult to create a culture of academic integrity on campus because these actions confirm the “everyone does it” phenomenon. “Everyone does it” is a common reason for cheating reported by students. Under normal circumstances, maintaining academic integrity when one sees their classmates cheating is difficult, but this William and Mary case could make it even more difficult for students. Imagine being a student that is struggling with an English assignment and is constantly pressured by their parents to receive high grades. After reading the article, one may consider that cheating or plagiarism is OK, because a school’s administrator did it, and many more may have also done it. For this reason, professors and administrators should all join the effort to create a culture of academic integrity on college campuses, not just as enforcers of policies, but also as followers. If academic integrity were more transparent and held all parties accountable, students would probably be more willing to abide by academic integrity policies because the standards are shared by all members of the academic campus.

Sources

Amid financial concerns, W&M to discontinue seven sports following the 2020-21 academic year. (n.d.). William & Mary. Retrieved November 16, 2020, from https://www.wm.edu/news/stories/2020/amid-financial-concerns,-wm-to-discontinue-seven-sports-following-the-2020-21-academic-year.php

Statement regarding communications about the future of Division I athletics at William & Mary. (n.d.). William & Mary. Retrieved November 16, 2020, from https://www.wm.edu/news/announcements/2020/statement-regarding-communications-about-the-future-of-division-i-athletics-at-william-mary.php

Section VI: Honor Code Violations. (n.d.). William & Mary. Retrieved November 16, 2020, from https://www.wm.edu/offices/deanofstudents/services/communityvalues/studenthandbook/honor_system/section_VI/index.php