Academic Integrity

Academic honesty is highly valued at Macomb. It is important to submit work that represents your original words or ideas.  Whenever you use another’s words or ideas, please cite all relevant sources and the extent to which these sources were used. Words or ideas that require citations include all hard copy or electronic publications; all verbal or visual communication; and all submissions to public meetings or mailboxes.

Academic honesty is highly valued at Macomb. It is important to submit work that represents your original words or ideas.  Whenever you use another’s words or ideas, please cite all relevant sources and the extent to which these sources were used. Words or ideas that require citations include all hard copy or electronic publications; all verbal or visual communication; and all submissions to public meetings or mailboxes.

Research Writing & Accidental Plagiarism

As this class teaches research writing and citation, incidents of paraphrasing and citation issues will typically be given the benefit of the doubt, allowing the student to resolve the issue and/or redo the assignment. However, it is the student's responsibility to attend class and learn how to use and cite sources appropriately. Papers/assignments that are copied in part or in full from another source with no attempt to cite may be reported to the college at the instructor's discretion without an opportunity to re-do the assignment. 

In other words, if you are attempting to use sources correctly and struggling, you will be given opportunities to resolve the problem. If it appears that no attempt to use research ethically was made or if it seems likely that you are intentionally plagiarizing or cheating, that will fall under the academic dishonesty policies. See the full academic dishonesty policy below. 

Plagiarism & Academic Integrity Policy

Instances of academic dishonesty or plagiarism that are grievous or have not been resolved after feedback is given (see Research Writing & Accidental Plagiarism) may result in a lowered grade on the assignment, a zero for the assignment with no opportunity for resubmission, or failure in the course, depending on the degree and type of dishonesty. An academic integrity report may also be filed with the college.  

Academic dishonesty could involve any of the following:

• Having someone complete an assignment for you

• Having someone make extensive revisions for you to an assignment (suggestions are always good; don't let someone rewrite your paper)

• Copying work or ideas written by another student

• Copying information, writing, or assignments off the internet

• Using information from outside sources without proper citation

  • • Since this is a research writing class, you will be incorporating the ideas from other texts. Those ideas must be quoted, paraphrased, or summarized and citations must be included. 

    • We'll go over this more in class, but the basic idea is: don't copy ideas from others without citing it (making it clear who the idea came from). 

• Turning in work that you did for another class without permission

• Using AI in inappropriate or dishonest ways (see the Generative AI Policy below).

Plagiarism and AI Detection

This class will be using CopyLeaks for plagiarism and AI detection. That said, this tool is not meant to be punitive but instructional in this class. In other words, except for in cases of blatent plagiarism and inappropriate AI use, your grade will not be effected by the score on the software (i.e. this is likely only going to come up if you did something intentionally unethical, and no matter what, I'll always have a conversation with you first). 

Benefits to plagiarism/AI detection tools:

• You can see areas of your paper that is being flagged in the system. This can help you catch mistakes with paraphrasing or quoting (but don't worry if you aren't sure what's going on either—see more on this in the drawbacks section below). 

• I can see if you are struggling with paraphrasing or quoting sources when you write about research. This is a really common problem, and it's helpful to me to have these areas highlighted. 

• If you are using AI in ways that follows the policy below, you can see if there are areas of your paper that are possibly becoming "too AI" or too robotic sounding. 

Possible Drawbacks:

• Students may panic or get stressed. Some students will panic if anything is flagged, even if there isn't actually a problem. All I can say to this is: don't panic! It's normal for some stuff to get flagged no matter what you do. 

• Students may revise the paper until it doesn't get flagged without understanding why it was flagged in the first place. I'd prefer you just leave it all in there and leave a note on your paper. Then I can see what's going on and offer suggestions for revision. 

• Student may get stressed if their paper is flagged and they don't understand what the issue is. Again, just leave me a note if you're worried. I can give you better feedback than the software. 

Generative AI Policy

If you choose to use Generative AI for this class, you are responsible for familiarizing yourself with and abiding by the following information and class policies. 

Be aware that all classes at Macomb will have different AI policies. It's your responsibility to learn the policy for each class. 

Using GenAI for Brainstorming

• You can employ AI tools to assist your brainstorming, but the main content, writing, research, and conclusions must be your own. 

  • • If you use AI to help with brainstorming ideas, you should use it as a starting place only. 

    • Do not use ideas directly from AI. Any outside information in this class must come from your own primary research (observations, interviews, etc.) or scholarly research. All research must be cited. 

    • For example, if you are struggling with coming up with possible research topics for your scholarly section of Project 1, have GenAI generate a list of ideas for you. You will not be using the ideas directly, but just as a starting place for your research. 

Be Cautious of...

• • • Using AI to generate ideas, beyond a brainstorming list, on topics that you are not already an expert.  AI can "hallucinate", which means it can give you wildly inaccurate information. 

    • Trusting its "knowledge" is complete or the full picture. GenAI struggles with understanding nuance within topics that can lead to it to providing inaccurate information. 

Using GenAI for Research

• You can use specialized AI tools to help you find academic sources, such as Semantic Scholar, Research Rabbit, Scite, Consensus, Connected Papers and/or Elicit. 

• You must still read the articles/research that AI suggests and not rely on the summary provided. We'll cover how to efficiently read academic sources in class to help with this. 

• All quotes and paraphrases must come from the original source, not the AI summary. 

Be Cautious of...

• Relying only on GenAI for research. While some of the new AI tools have the potential to be really helpful, they are in the early stages of development. You should still attempt to find some sources through Google Scholar, JSTOR, or other library databases. 

• Using summary information or quotes from GenAI. You have no way to guarantee that AI is giving you an accurate response. All information must be fact checked with the original source. 

• Using general purpose GenAI, such as ChatGPT or Claude, for scholarly research. These AIs are not designed for academic research and are often inaccurate. 

Using GenAI for Writing & Revision

• You can use GenAI to help you organize your ideas, revise, and/or proofread AFTER you've written a draft. 

  • • That draft doesn't have to be polished—it can be messily jotted down ideas and thoughts you want to include. The big thing is that you're providing it with your ideas and not asking it to do the thinking for you. 

• GenAI works significantly better as a tool for writing than as a writer itself. 

• Write out your ideas first. The writing can be messy; it can be bulleted lists of thoughts and points you want to make. But it should be your ideas first. You can use AI to help you organize your ideas or rewrite the ideas 

• Stick to small sections at a time. If you put a whole draft in at once, you're unlikely to notice if AI changed your ideas around or messed up one of your sources. If you are using AI to help you organize your thoughts or clarifying your writing, I recommend never putting more than one paragraph at a time into it. 

• Always, always check and double-check the output. AI may completely change the meaning of a sentence. It's not actually intelligent; it's using large amounts of data to guess at what should be written. You're responsible for ensuring that everything written is accurate and your ideas (and your research) is not misrepresented. 

• Don't let it erase you as a writer. You likely already have a writing voice for some genres (for example, when you text friends, email, post on social media, write your class notes, and maybe even when you write essays for classes). In college, ideally, you'll continue to develop your writing voice. Don't let AI take that away. This is another reason to stick to small sections at a time. It can let you pick and choose what you allow AI to revise for you. 

• Get ideas for revision. Instead of asking it to rewrite something for you, ask it to give you suggestions for revision. This will allow you to improve your writing from the feedback. 

• Instead of broadly asking it to rewrite your writing, be specific. Use prompts that ask AI to clarify your writing, make your writing more concise, or fix the grammar of your writing. While the output still needs to be checked, asking for specific writing help typically stops AI from changing too many ideas or making the work not your own. 

• Use AI for proofreading. This is another area that AI can shine. Take one paragraph at a time and ask AI to fix any grammar and mechanics errors in your writing. Again, you need to be careful about checking the output in case it changes something in a way that changes the meaning. You also should be careful about it not erasing your writing voice here, but it can be helpful as a proofreader to clean up those errors you didn't notice. 

• Ask AI to summarize the most common types of grammatical errors it sees in your writing. It's useful to learn what error trends you tend to have as a writer. Then work on improving one skill at a time. For example, if you tend to struggle with run-on sentences, learn how to identify run-on sentences so that you can easily revise your writing in the future. 

  • • Even as GenAI becomes more commonly used, there will be situations both in college and the workplace where you will likely not have AI available to you (or may not be able to use for legal purposes in the workplace). Use this time in this class and in college to slowly improve your writing by focusing on one writing skill at a time. 

• Take everything it says and writes with a grain of salt. It can be a pretty powerful tool to help with research and writing, but it's just technology at the end of the day. It doesn't have critical thinking and common sense. 

Since you are not an expert in academic research writing or the topics that you'll be writing about, the issues with AI writing may not be obvious to you. It will look at sound academic and impressive. However, if you have AI write something for you, it often tends to sweeping statement, generalizations, and repetition of ideas. It does not do well with academic research writing on its own. It works better when it has a LOT of input. That doesn't just mean adding more prompts, that means writing things yourself and using AI to help along with way. 

Some appropriate ways to use AI for writing

Be Cautious of...

• Using AI as a writer. It works better as a tool for advice, co-authoring, and revision than it does as an idea-generating writer. 

• Using the ideas from AI or letting it change your ideas. 

• Losing your writing voice in your paper. No one wants to read a paper that sounds generic and robotic. You don't need to be "exciting" but a complete lack of voice can be extra boring to read. 

• Using AI in a way that introduces common AI writing problems, like vaguely covering topics, being repetitive from paragraph to paragraph, etc. (In other words, the more you rely on AI, the more likely it is that you'll accidentally introduce AI-specific problems into your paper).