Present: Bozak, Clendenning, Cox, Pretzat

Misconduct data:

Data on academic misconduct during the 2007-2008 academic year was distributed, as well as data summarizing incidents in the past five fall semesters in the College of Arts & Sciences. Discussion ensued about the data, if/how to present it, how little it represents of the potential problem, etc. In the end, it was decided to provide a summary of data, where the actual class wouldn't be identified, but rather the division/subdivision of the class (i.e., "Natural Science" rather than GEO315). The idea behind this suggestion was to not single out particular courses so that students react to the class rather than to the incident. We would also identify the course as lower division or upper division.

We would want to publicize this information in First Choice courses, writing courses and the Library might choose to include the information in their courses. We would also place the data in context, re: the results of the McCabe survey on cheating on our campus.

Discussion also led to the process of notification. It was suggested that a webform be created to assist faculty in reporting incidents of misconduct.

Turnitin Pilot:

We've gotten information that we will be able to use Turnitin for the Spring 2009 semester for a fee of $500. Bozak will update our draft Pilot Proposal and send it out to the committee for comment before forwarding it to the Provost. As the trial use would be an Angel integration, we will also send the proposal to Joe Moreau, to see if the fee could be shared with the Provost. We will then need to build the educational component for faculty, the guidelines for use on campus and the boilerplate to be added to the syllabi of faculty who choose to use the product.

We'll want to begin to craft the type of assessment data that we would want to create. We should invite faculty who turned in plagiarism incidents last year to see if they'd be willing to participate.

Integrity course:

Conversation then turned to course development. The goal is to build an intro to cheating/plagiarism as an Angel module that any faculty member could assign to their students. It might become the foundation for a "checkpoint" style class that would be mandated for students found to have engaged in misconduct. We'll need volunteers to work on this. We'll want to embed questions at random through the course and if successfully completed, a certificate could be sent to a student via email, which they could then use to present to instructors to demonstrate that they've completed the module.

Integrity statement:

What to do? Since there seems to be no support for the integrity statement at higher levels, given the current campus goals, it was felt that the best solution would be to put it on the back burner and bring it back to the front when the use of turnitin, the integrity module, etc. raises the profile of this issue on campus.

blog:

Just an update. There is no blogging software on campus, and it is not a priority of CTS. Computer Science might be willing to put up WordPress software and that would provide for an oswego.edu type of URL for a blog. Bozak will keep folks informed.

Respectfully submitted,

-David Bozak