NINA LEE
News Writer

Oct. 4 to 8 was Academic Integrity Week, a seminar series designed to educate students and staff on academic integrity.

The sessions were held during the day and likely conflicted with your class schedule; so for those of you who missed the sessions, STM English professor Edna Froese, shared her perspective on academic integrity.

Froese said that academic dishonesty is a growing issue and considers it her responsibility to educate students on how to properly cite literary sources.

“Research is all about learning from other people and building on that knowledge. So you acknowledge the building blocks that came before and the bit you are adding,” she explained.

“Research is all about learning from other people and building on that knowledge.”
-Edna Froese
STM English professor

In her course-work she employs an editing, revising and re-editing process with her students, which makes plagiarism difficult. This process appears to be effective: she has only discovered two extreme cases of plagiarism. The majority of cases, Dr. Froese refers to as, “naïve plagiarism” wherein the student fails to distinguish their ideas from another author’s or fails to cite accordingly.

“I do not mark looking for plagiarism. The flags have to go up before I will pay attention,” says Froese. These flags include drastic change in style, vocabulary, and degree of sentence sophistication. She uses Google search when confronted with telltale signs or when she reads a passage that seems too familiar. The Internet has made both cheating and catching cheaters easier.

Previously, professors had to submit all issues of plagiarism to the Academic Dishonesty Committee, which was composed of faculty and one student representative. However, the policy was recently revised, granting professors the option to give a grade of zero to students found cheating.

Academic integrity is not only the responsibility of the professors but also that of the student. It is about students owning and taking pride in their work, originality, and crediting those who have come before us.

As Sir Isaac Newton once said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”.

Update: This article had originally stated Edna Froese’s as a U of S Canadian literature professor. She is, in fact, an STM English professor.