The Academic Integrity Spectrum: From Help to Cheating

The best tip I have is that you should try to understand that there is a ‘spectrum’ of behaviors involving working with others on activities and assignments related to your university studies. On one side is “legitimate” help: The closer you are to activities suggested by or required by your professor, or services offered by your university, the safer you’ll be. And the further away you are from this – the closer you are to paying people you don’t know to work on an assignment for you – the closer to academic dishonesty you are. And there are some areas in between. Here are four “zones” I’ve come up with to help you classify which types of help are more likely to be acceptable, which ones you should be careful about, and which ones you should avoid.

The Green Zone. Forms of support that fall into this category are  seen as more or less “legitimate” sources of help from your professor’s and/or the university policy’s perspective. They are allowed or even encouraged by professors and the university as a whole because they are designed to help students learn and succeed where they may have challenges.

Here are some things that would fall quite clearly on the “OK” side of the spectrum:

Assigned group work: This is the classic professor-sanctioned version of “working together” on an assignment. As educators have recognized how much learning happens in the interactions we have with peers, these assignments have become more common. Your professor will (hopefully) make clear what each group member is meant to contribute and how the group and individuals will be evaluated. (If they are not clear, you can ask for clarification!) In this case, your professor expects you to work together with others, not only to “do your own work.” This can sometimes be tricky to navigate because just like in the outside-of-school world, not everyone always does their fair share of work (this is probably another reason professors assign group work: it’s realistic). In their meta-analysis of academic integrity, McClung and Schnieder (2014) describe being a “slacker” in group work as a kind of academic dishonesty. If you experience problems with someone not doing the work they agreed to, it’s important to bring the concern to your instructor.

In-class peer review: This is a formalized, classroom version of the type of informal help many people like to get on their assignments. Most writing classes use some form of peer feedback – I often use it in my own courses. The useful thing about this (compared to informal or paid editing) is that because your instructor will help guide the process, everyone will be aware of the standards and criteria they’re looking for in a successful paper. Usually, your professor will offer some kind of rubric or criteria to follow, and will often provide a mini “training” for the class before you engage in this. Getting feedback from a variety of sources can be very useful for you as a writer, and seeing what other people are writing in your class can be helpful so you see what the possible approaches to the assignment might look like. It’s helpful to provide your fellow academic writers with what rhetoric scholar Peter Elbow (1973) calls a “movie of your mind” when you read their paper: What made sense to you? What didn’t? Where were you confused, and where were you delighted? What words or phrases made an impression on you? This can help the writer (you!) make decisions about how to revise the paper to make it better.

Campus writing centers or learning centers: Writing centres are common on almost every campus, although they aren’t always called the “writing centre.” In places like this, you may find sessions, materials, or workshops about things like improving your writing, note-taking skills, general study skills, (not) procrastinating, planning assignments, and other practical help with academic tasks. Most writing centres employ peer tutors – often students like you, but who may have more experience with writing – who you can meet with in one-on-one consultations to discuss your written assignments. You should note that writing centre philosophy is very clear that they see their role as helping to “produce better writers, not better writing” (North, 1984, p. 438). This means that they will help you think through all the issues involved in producing well-written papers, but they will usually not “edit” or “fix the grammar” in any given paper. They may, however, try to help you with the tools you might need to do that on your own.

Accessible learning centres or centres for students with disabilities: If you have, or suspect you may have, a learning disability or another condition that may lead to challenges with completing academic work, your campus has a centre you can register with that may be able to offer assistance. Depending on your situation, there are a variety of services they may offer: They might be able to provide someone to read tests and quizzes to you, provide extra time on exams, help record your lectures, make your textbooks into audiobooks, and so on.

The Friend Zone. The next category on the spectrum is one of the most common – lending a hand to your friends or classmates to help each other succeed in academic endeavors. This kind of informal peer help is usually considered legitimate, but it can cross the line into academic dishonesty if you’re not aware of your professors’ or your university’s expectations. The activities in this category are mostly things students have been doing for hundreds if not thousands of years. The thing you need to be aware of is when it could cross the line between “help” and “unauthorized collaboration.” This could include things like:

Study groups: It’s common to form small, informal groups to study for exams or other assignments. People may share notes, discuss ideas, work out problems together, share solutions, and so on. All of this is usually pretty OK but it’s important to ask your professor what they consider acceptable collaboration. Sadly, there are many horror stories of students studying together and then being accused of academic misconduct when turning in substantially similar answers on exams. It’s important that when you work together, you’re helping each other with basic definitions and concepts, but not copying or memorizing word-for-word answers that you plan to write on an exam. In 2012, there was a huge cheating scandal at Harvard that seems to have resulted from students sharing notes, but then completing an online open book exam with markedly similar answers, right down to a misplaced comma in a number. Class group chats might also belong in this category – they can be great for clarifying information (“what was the homework today?” “was anyone else confused by the chart on page 27 of the reading?”) but they could be used by people who are trying to facilitate cheating or just want to copy your answers.

Informal peer review or peer editing of papers: Again, this is quite common – I think most people ask a roommate, friend, or family member to look over a paper from time to time. I usually tell my students that this is fine with me as long as that other person isn’t making substantial changes to the paper. I’ll touch more on this in the section on professional editors below, but a general rule is: the more someone is focused on “surface-level” help like grammar, punctuation, formatting, fonts, line spacing, and the like,  the more “OK” it is. If you start getting into having someone else re-write whole sentences, you may be in trouble.

The Grey Zone. Usually working together with friends is OK, as long as you’re not rewriting their papers or copying their answers. Now we move into more of a grey area still: “stuff you pay for.” I don’t think it’s 100% wrong to pay for help with academic work: Some of this can be acceptable, some might not be. The interesting thing about this grey zone is that most of these things can be done ethically or unethically. For example, if you use Chegg to look at sample problems to help you figure out how they got to their solutions, or pay an editor to do light grammatical edits that they explain to you, or pay a tutor to explain difficult concepts to you in, say, your first language or to help you generally supplement your knowledge of a particular subject – you’re probably OK. (You may be out some money, but you wouldn’t necessarily be breaking any rules – though your mileage may vary depending on what your professor requires and what your university’s policy is.)

Websites like Chegg and Coursehero: At best, these are monetized versions of everything mentioned in the previous section – instead of friends, you’re paying a website to give you access to a lot of peoples’ notes, assignments, and other various materials. At worst, though, these are cheating subscriptions where some students hire  “tutors” to actually complete work for them. Again, as long as your goal is understanding material, and you are not using these sites as a “shortcut,” you may be in the clear – but you should also know that part of the ethical grey areas of these sites is that it can be argued that they are a party to the stealing of professors’ intellectual property. Some universities have begun filing lawsuits against companies who allow students to share things like past exams. This is probably not something you want to be involved in but, overall, we can’t say these sites are only used for cheating. I know plenty of students who use them to aid their overall understanding of course materials.

Paying a professional editor/proofreader: This, too, is a monetized version of the kinds of peer help you might find in the other sections. To make sure you’re in the clear, there are two things you’ll want to do: Make sure your instructor or supervisor is OK with you getting some professional help “polishing” your writing (which they may not always be), and make sure that the kind of editing you are paying for is what professional editors call “copy editing” (which deals with helping to fix grammar) and/or “proofreading” (which deals with typographical errors, formatting, and so on). Other types of professional editing services include “structural editing,” which usually involves making significant changes to the content and structure of a piece of writing, and “stylistic editing,” which usually has more to do with word choice. Many professional editors are aware that doing the latter two types of editing is considered unethical when it comes to students’ academic work. In fact, Editors Canada, a professional association for editors, has strict guidelines on editing student work, only permitting “flagging” of errors rather than “fixing” them for undergraduates, and, to a limited degree, minor corrections to grammar and word choice for graduate students. Not every editor will abide by these guidelines, but you will be safest if your goal in approaching a paid editor is mainly to have them help you fix your grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors.

Paying a professional tutor: There are several situations in which students may want to do this. The most common case I’ve encountered tends to be language-related: You may want to hire someone to offer general help with a language (often English, if you’re looking to improve your overall ability to function academically in that language, though it is also not uncommon with those studying “foreign” languages who want to practice outside of class), or you may want to hire someone who can explain complicated concepts to you in a language you are more familiar with. There are a growing number of tutoring agencies who offer subject-matter tutoring in students’ first languages (i.e., languages other than English), and as long as the tutors are not offering to complete your work, this can be a helpful way to get up to speed in difficult courses. (However, you may find that as you get further along in your studies, it makes more sense to learn the material in English; Zhang-Wu (2022) found that some students she interviewed stopped asking for help in their first language after their first semester or two of study in English.) Based on ongoing research I am engaged in with some colleagues in B.C., it does seem that some of the students who pay tutors for help do occasionally find themselves in what I have called the “no-go zone” below. It’s not a good idea to ask tutors to complete assignments for you because then you’re less likely to learn the material and more likely to not master it and perform poorly on exams and other forms of assessment.

The No-Go Zone. Finally, we come to the “no-go zone” – if you find yourself here, you’re in trouble. Students sometimes find themselves here out of desperation or a sense that anything would be better than flunking out of university. (Personally, I disagree: I think being expelled for cheating is worse than getting bad grades.) Obviously, as a professor, I think all of these things are wrong and I understand that sometimes it feels like there’s no other way out, but I would strongly encourage you to avoid all of the following:

Paying for a pre-written paper from a “paper mill” (or finding one for free online) and turning it in with your name on it: This is now a fairly “old school” method of cheating. It is often easily detected because the papers are often available online, so all a professor has to do is pop a few phrases into Google and find that the paper has been plagiarized. Instructors who teach courses with writing assignments generally get to know students’ writing styles pretty well and are pretty good at noticing when something doesn’t look right. 0/10, not recommended.

Paying someone to write a paper for you: This is still wrong, but in theory it’s easier to “get away with” because if you are paying someone to write an original paper, it will be “free of plagiarism.” However, it comes with many other dangers that make it not worth your time. First, you cannot guarantee the quality of a paper like this: Many are written by people outside North America who may not be familiar with the conventions of academic writing here, and you can’t be certain they won’t resort to some copying-and-pasting or Google Translate-facilitated plagiarism. (I have seen some papers that were clearly just translated from foreign-language paper mills.) Second, and perhaps more seriously, there is a growing trend of blackmail among these “service” providers. It is now not uncommon for a “professional paper-writer” to demand more money and threaten to expose the student who paid them – and in many cases, they have no hesitation to email the student’s professor or department head if they don’t get what they want. I have heard of multiple cases of this in the last few months alone. This is a shady business, and we don’t know what lengths they might be willing to go to try to extort money from students. This can get scary, so for many reasons, it is best avoided.

Prompting an AI language model to write a paper, solve a problem, or generate code for you: As I write this in the Fall of 2022, everyone is talking about AI-generated text (and art, for that matter). ChatGPT and other programs appear to be able to answer informational questions correctly, fix errors in computer programmers’ code accurately, and create whole-cloth original examples of essays based on complicated prompts. We’ll never have to write anything again if computers can do it for us, right? Well, maybe not. AI language models can “do” tasks, but they cannot think, reason, make inferences, have ideas, or even cite sources or provide references. You might be able to get an AI to write a very generic short essay that looks impressive on the surface, but at this point it simply does not appear capable of producing a truly well-written academic paper of the type you might be assigned in a university course. This might change, but you can be sure that if it does, professors will change the way they give assignments in order to make AI-generated assignments less feasible.

Hiring a “tutor” who provides you with answers, takes a course online for you, or impersonates you during an exam: I hope it goes without saying that this is the no-goiest of the no-go zone. Not only is this academic fraud, which is going to be against the policy of every university in the world, but this is the kind of thing that people can and do actually get arrested for. Please, please, please do not do these things.