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What It Means to Be a Student Today

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Book cover Handbook of Academic Integrity

Abstract

It is ineffective to address the topic of teaching and enforcing academic integrity without understanding the lives, hopes, values, and challenges of those who are expected to enact it: college students. This chapter argues that students and faculty are unlikely to share views of the meaning and especially the importance of academic integrity, which is, after all, a set of notions peculiar to the professional ethics of the contemporary world of letters; compliance may be demanded and obtained without genuine embrace of the concept. Many aspects of students’ lives explain reasons for neglect and disregard of norms of academic integrity; only a few support those norms. Presentation of these contexts is not intended to excuse violations of academic integrity. It is to explain what students may think – or fail to think – about the topic and to show why it is so difficult to get students’ attention on this subject, no matter how many times they may sign affirmations upholding institutional norms of academic integrity. This chapter shows that many, or most, students are distracted, busy, and stressed and live with attention directed everywhere but at upholding norms of academic integrity.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, The University of Notre Dame, 611 Flanner Hall, Notre Dame, IN, 46556, USA

    Susan D. Blum

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  1. Susan D. Blum
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Correspondence to Susan D. Blum .

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  1. University of South Australia, School of Management, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

    Tracey Bretag

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Blum, S.D. (2016). What It Means to Be a Student Today. In: Bretag, T. (eds) Handbook of Academic Integrity. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-098-8_57

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