Academic Integrity in the Twenty-First Century: A Teaching and Learning Imperative (review)

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Reviewed by: Academic Integrity in the Twenty-First Century: A Teaching and Learning Imperative Tanner Chesney Tricia Bertram Gallant. Academic Integrity in the Twenty-First Century: A Teaching and Learning Imperative. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008. 144 pp. Paper: $28.00. ISBN-13: 978-0470373668. Tricia Bertram Gallant’s Academic Integrity in the Twenty-First Century is a well-developed monograph focusing on the issues of academic dishonesty and calls for a new approach to address how academia responds to violations of academic misconduct. Bertram Gallant provides a historical context for academic misconduct in the United States and very useful background information for understanding how our responses to academic dishonesty have evolved over time. Beginning with the colonial period and progressing through to our modern university, she outlines the rise of honor codes and the development and implementation of rules to confront the issues of academic dishonesty. Bertram Gallant examines the two basic strategies and their hybrids that institutions currently employ for dealing with academic dishonesty: the rule-compliance strategy and the integrity strategy. The rule-compliance strategy uses academic conduct policies and places them in the general listing of proscribed behaviors for students. It also outlines the process for which alleged violations of academic misconduct are handled (p. 35). The integrity strategy, through the use of honor codes, emphasizes the importance of committing to the principles of academic integrity as essential to the educational mission of the institution. While the rule-compliance strategy makes academic misconduct a disciplinary issue, the integrity strategy stresses both disciplinary and developmental methods for responding to academic dishonesty. Using a review of the literature, Bertram Gallant explores four dimensions—internal, organizational, institutional and societal—to provide a more detailed explanation of the academic misconduct problem. The internal dimension suggests that when a student cheats or plagiarizes, he or she chooses to do so even though he or she knows the behavior is wrong. The internal dimension states that a student’s decision to cheat stems from a moral failing. The organizational dimension suggests that it is peer norms and lack of faculty involvement in the classroom which create an environment that encourages academic misconduct. Bertram Gallant cited a study suggesting that, when there is a conflict between institutional and peer group norms, many students will choose to develop the relationship with their peers even if it means not following the campus code of conduct (p. 52). In addition, instructors play an important role: They develop lesson plans, decide what gets taught, and control the discussion in the classroom. Instructors who reuse tests from previous terms may be sending the message that academic integrity is not a priority and, therefore, are modeling behavior that is no different than students who submit the same paper to more than one class. The institutional dimension of academic misconduct holds that the institution may be complicit in creating an environment where academic dishonesty is allowed to develop. Pressure on faculty to publish and bring in more funding for the college or university has the goal of increasing its institutional prestige in the marketplace of higher education. Students are affected by a similar pressure to produce so that they can get the credits necessary to graduate and, thus, advance in their careers. This attitude creates a transactional relationship, not a transformative one, between the institution and its students and faculty (p. 54). This problem is at the root of Bertram Gallant’s work: How are schools ensuring that their students are learning? The societal dimension attempts to explain academic misconduct in the larger context beyond the internal, organizational, and institutional dimensions to the society in which students and the educational institutions reside (p. 57). Although research in this area is limited, technological forces, [End Page 544] such as the introduction of the personal computer and the internet are challenging traditional notions of authorship and original thought. Students are able to collaborate with each other without being in the same room. Bertram Gallant notes that the two strategies for dealing with academic misconduct—rule compliance and integrity—tend to focus only on the internal and organizational dimensions of academic misconduct and do not adequately address the institutional and societal forces. While...