WAW #8: Policy Revisions

I am currently a Senior at Eastern Kentucky University, while being here I have been encouraged to appreciate and honor academic values, have intellectual honesty, and respect for others. An area that this involves greatly is through plagiarism. EKU has created an Academic Integrity Policy that outlines the core values that students attending school should have. It also includes potential sanctions and actions that could occur if proper conduct is broken.

The Academic Integrity policy is extremely beneficial for students, but there are some places that seem to be a gray area leaving one to be confused. When given the opportunity to revise this policy with a group of my peers we felt that overall the policy was great. It contained a lot of information and easily broke the process of handling academic dishonesty well. The main issue that we found would be the true definition of triviality.

In the Academic Integrity Policy states: "A case may be dismissed if it is found to be trivial. A trivial case is one with no possible consequences to a matter of legitimate concern of the academic community or one with no tendency to undermine trust within the community."

The revision that should be made to this is to be more specific about what type of cases are considered to be trivial, and what about them makes it trivial. EKU could even go one step farther to show examples of potential trivial cases. When looking up the definition of trivial it means of little value of importance. Who decides what is considered important or unimportant? Shouldn't all academic dishonesty be alerting and important? It's confusing the way that it is now, and needs to be clarified, so by giving more information it could eliminate uncertainty. If yo"u would like to read more about how EKU is striving for honesty you can go to: http://www.studentrights.eku.edu/academic-integrity-policy"