Instructors and students represent the closest, most important partnership in supporting learning, academic integrity, and reducing academic misconduct at Boise State. Thank you for working with and mentoring your students each week!
Syllabi are one way instructors might help set the tone for their course and mentorship of students. The Academic Integrity Program encourages you to have at a minimum the following language (or similar language) included in your syllabus to promote academic integrity and set clear expectations in the event that academic misconduct occurs in your class. Please feel free to revise to suit your needs.
Suggested Syllabus Template
When you graduate from Boise State, we want you to feel confident that your paper diploma represents strong skills, abilities, and knowledge that you developed through your coursework. This is academic integrity. When we all build and practice a culture of academic integrity in our programs, courses, and inside ourselves, we feel confident in the value of our degrees.
Academic integrity asks students to engage honestly with their coursework to develop new abilities. This means acting and working honestly, transparently, and ethically in every assignment and every interaction with a peer, professor, or research participant to support our community of academic excellence. If you are not sure what behaviors would be considered dishonest, please ask me and/ or read some examples inside Section 8 of the Student Code of Conduct (which offers 20+ descriptions of cheating, plagiarism, and unauthorized collaboration behaviors so that you can avoid them).
Academic integrity is everyone’s responsibility. Boise State and I take academic misconduct like cheating and plagiarism very seriously because it can prevent student-learning: my greatest goal for you.
- It’s important to know that when a student engages in academic misconduct of any type, I will report the incident to the Office of the Dean of Students.
- In response to student academic misconduct, instructors can assign grade sanctions. This is because when students cheat, we cannot tell whether you’ve learned and mastered the course material and are ready to move forward. Possible grade sanctions include but are not limited to requirements to revise or redo work, complete educational assignments to learn about academic integrity, and grade penalties ranging from lower credit on an assignment up to an assigned ‘F for the class.’
- Students can and should learn more by reviewing the Student Code of Conduct.
Other Recommendations
When crafting a syllabus statement on academic integrity and discussing the academic integrity policy with students, you are encouraged to:
- Describe observable examples of effective problem-solving and learning in your course, and describe observable versions of what you’d consider misconduct so students know concretely what to avoid (some concrete descriptions are in Student Code of Conduct: Section 8);
- Highlight why academic integrity matters to you, to your field, and to your students, rather than focus on just the potential consequences of academic misconduct;
- Draw connections between the principle of academic integrity in your class and the skills and abilities your students will need in their future from your course (can include ‘knowing how to learn, knowing how to write for an audience, etc);
- Clarify expectations for collaboration, citation, and appropriate use of notes/ class materials in your class;
- Clearly state any sanctions that you will assign for particular kinds of common incidents. It may be useful to utilize the phrase, “Including but not limited to.”
Please also see our Faculty Page entitled “Promote Academic Integrity!”
Consultation
If you, your department, or college would like feedback on your syllabus statement(s), please reach out to the Academic Integrity Program at academicintegrity@boisestate.edu. Thank you!