what is academic dishonesty essay

Frequently asked questions

What is academic dishonesty.

Academic dishonesty refers to deceitful or misleading behavior in an academic setting. Academic dishonesty can occur intentionally or unintentionally, and varies in severity.

It can encompass paying for a pre-written essay, cheating on an exam, or committing plagiarism . It can also include helping others cheat, copying a friend’s homework answers, or even pretending to be sick to miss an exam.

Academic dishonesty doesn’t just occur in a classroom setting, but also in research and other academic-adjacent fields.

Frequently asked questions: Plagiarism

Academic integrity means being honest, ethical, and thorough in your academic work. To maintain academic integrity, you should avoid misleading your readers about any part of your research and refrain from offenses like plagiarism and contract cheating, which are examples of academic misconduct.

Plagiarism is a form of theft, since it involves taking the words and ideas of others and passing them off as your own. As such, it’s academically dishonest and can have serious consequences .

Plagiarism also hinders the learning process, obscuring the sources of your ideas and usually resulting in bad writing. Even if you could get away with it, plagiarism harms your own learning.

Most online plagiarism checkers only have access to public databases, whose software doesn’t allow you to compare two documents for plagiarism.

However, in addition to our Plagiarism Checker , Scribbr also offers an Self-Plagiarism Checker . This is an add-on tool that lets you compare your paper with unpublished or private documents. This way you can rest assured that you haven’t unintentionally plagiarized or self-plagiarized .

Compare two sources for plagiarism

Most institutions have an internal database of previously submitted student papers. Turnitin can check for self-plagiarism by comparing your paper against this database. If you’ve reused parts of an assignment you already submitted, it will flag any similarities as potential plagiarism.

Online plagiarism checkers don’t have access to your institution’s database, so they can’t detect self-plagiarism of unpublished work. If you’re worried about accidentally self-plagiarizing, you can use Scribbr’s Self-Plagiarism Checker to upload your unpublished documents and check them for similarities.

Yes, reusing your own work without acknowledgment is considered self-plagiarism . This can range from re-submitting an entire assignment to reusing passages or data from something you’ve turned in previously without citing them.

Self-plagiarism often has the same consequences as other types of plagiarism . If you want to reuse content you wrote in the past, make sure to check your university’s policy or consult your professor.

If you are reusing content or data you used in a previous assignment, make sure to cite yourself. You can cite yourself just as you would cite any other source: simply follow the directions for that source type in the citation style you are using.

Keep in mind that reusing your previous work can be considered self-plagiarism , so make sure you ask your professor or consult your university’s handbook before doing so.

Common knowledge does not need to be cited. However, you should be extra careful when deciding what counts as common knowledge.

Common knowledge encompasses information that the average educated reader would accept as true without needing the extra validation of a source or citation.

Common knowledge should be widely known, undisputed and easily verified. When in doubt, always cite your sources.

Plagiarism has serious consequences , and can indeed be illegal in certain scenarios.

While most of the time plagiarism in an undergraduate setting is not illegal, plagiarism or self-plagiarism in a professional academic setting can lead to legal action, including copyright infringement and fraud. Many scholarly journals do not allow you to submit the same work to more than one journal, and if you do not credit a co-author, you could be legally defrauding them.

Even if you aren’t breaking the law, plagiarism can seriously impact your academic career. While the exact consequences of plagiarism vary by institution and severity, common consequences include: a lower grade, automatically failing a course, academic suspension or probation, or even expulsion.

Accidental plagiarism is one of the most common examples of plagiarism . Perhaps you forgot to cite a source, or paraphrased something a bit too closely. Maybe you can’t remember where you got an idea from, and aren’t totally sure if it’s original or not.

These all count as plagiarism, even though you didn’t do it on purpose. When in doubt, make sure you’re citing your sources . Also consider running your work through a plagiarism checker tool prior to submission, which work by using advanced database software to scan for matches between your text and existing texts.

Scribbr’s Plagiarism Checker takes less than 10 minutes and can help you turn in your paper with confidence.

Self-plagiarism means recycling work that you’ve previously published or submitted as an assignment. It’s considered academic dishonesty to present something as brand new when you’ve already gotten credit and perhaps feedback for it in the past.

If you want to refer to ideas or data from previous work, be sure to cite yourself.

If you’re concerned that you may have self-plagiarized, Scribbr’s Self-Plagiarism Checker can help you turn in your paper with confidence. It compares your work to unpublished or private documents that you upload, so you can rest assured that you haven’t unintentionally plagiarized.

Incremental plagiarism means inserting quotes, passages, or excerpts from other works into your assignment without properly citing the original source.

Even if the vast majority of the text is yours, including any content that isn’t without citing it is plagiarism.

Consider using a plagiarism checker yourself before submitting your work. Plagiarism checkers work by scanning your document, comparing it to a database of webpages and publications, and highlighting passages that appear similar to other texts.

Patchwork plagiarism (aka mosaic plagiarism) means copying phrases, passages, or ideas from various existing sources and combining them to create a new text. While this type of plagiarism is more insidious than simply copy-pasting directly from a source, plagiarism checkers like Turnitin’s can still easily detect it.

To avoid plagiarism in any form, remember to cite your sources . Also consider running your work through a plagiarism checker tool prior to submission, which work by using advanced database software to scan for matches between your text and existing texts.

Verbatim plagiarism means copying text from a source and pasting it directly into your own document without giving proper credit.

Even if you delete a few words or replace them with synonyms, it still counts as verbatim plagiarism.

To use an author’s exact words, quote the original source by putting the copied text in quotation marks and including an in-text citation .

If you’re worried about plagiarism, consider running your work through a plagiarism checker tool prior to submission, which work by using advanced database software to scan for matches between your text and existing texts.

Global plagiarism means taking an entire work written by someone else and passing it off as your own. This can mean getting someone else to write an essay or assignment for you, or submitting a text you found online as your own work.

Global plagiarism is the most serious type of plagiarism because it involves deliberately and directly lying about the authorship of a work. It can have severe consequences .

To ensure you aren’t accidentally plagiarizing, consider running your work through plagiarism checker tool prior to submission. These tools work by using advanced database software to scan for matches between your text and existing texts.

Plagiarism can be detected by your professor or readers if the tone, formatting, or style of your text is different in different parts of your paper, or if they’re familiar with the plagiarized source.

Many universities also use plagiarism detection software like Turnitin’s, which compares your text to a large database of other sources, flagging any similarities that come up.

It can be easier than you think to commit plagiarism by accident. Consider using a plagiarism checker prior to submitting your paper to ensure you haven’t missed any citations.

Some examples of plagiarism include:

• Copying and pasting a Wikipedia article into the body of an assignment
• Quoting a source without including a citation
• Not paraphrasing a source properly, such as maintaining wording too close to the original
• Forgetting to cite the source of an idea

The most surefire way to avoid plagiarism is to always cite your sources . When in doubt, cite!

If you’re concerned about plagiarism, consider running your work through a plagiarism checker tool prior to submission. Scribbr’s Plagiarism Checker takes less than 10 minutes and can help you turn in your paper with confidence.

Plagiarism means presenting someone else’s work as your own without giving proper credit to the original author. In academic writing, plagiarism involves using words, ideas, or information from a source without including a citation .

Plagiarism can have serious consequences , even when it’s done accidentally. To avoid plagiarism, it’s important to keep track of your sources and cite them correctly.

Academic dishonesty can be intentional or unintentional, ranging from something as simple as claiming to have read something you didn’t to copying your neighbor’s answers on an exam.

You can commit academic dishonesty with the best of intentions, such as helping a friend cheat on a paper. Severe academic dishonesty can include buying a pre-written essay or the answers to a multiple-choice test, or falsifying a medical emergency to avoid taking a final exam.

Consequences of academic dishonesty depend on the severity of the offense and your institution’s policy. They can range from a warning for a first offense to a failing grade in a course to expulsion from your university.

For those in certain fields, such as nursing, engineering, or lab sciences, not learning fundamentals properly can directly impact the health and safety of others. For those working in academia or research, academic dishonesty impacts your professional reputation, leading others to doubt your future work.

Paraphrasing without crediting the original author is a form of plagiarism , because you’re presenting someone else’s ideas as if they were your own.

However, paraphrasing is not plagiarism if you correctly cite the source . This means including an in-text citation and a full reference, formatted according to your required citation style .

As well as citing, make sure that any paraphrased text is completely rewritten in your own words.

Plagiarism means using someone else’s words or ideas and passing them off as your own. Paraphrasing means putting someone else’s ideas in your own words.

So when does paraphrasing count as plagiarism?

• Paraphrasing is plagiarism if you don’t properly credit the original author.
• Paraphrasing is plagiarism if your text is too close to the original wording (even if you cite the source). If you directly copy a sentence or phrase, you should quote it instead.
• Paraphrasing  is not plagiarism if you put the author’s ideas completely in your own words and properly cite the source .

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If you’ve properly paraphrased or quoted and correctly cited the source, you are not committing plagiarism.

However, the word correctly is vital. In order to avoid plagiarism , you must adhere to the guidelines of your citation style  (e.g. APA  or MLA ).

You can use the Scribbr Plagiarism Checker to make sure you haven’t missed any citations, while our Citation Checker ensures you’ve properly formatted your citations in APA style.

The consequences of plagiarism vary depending on the type of plagiarism and the context in which it occurs. For example, submitting a whole paper by someone else will have the most severe consequences, while accidental citation errors are considered less serious.

If you’re a student, then you might fail the course, be suspended or expelled, or be obligated to attend a workshop on plagiarism. It depends on whether it’s your first offense or you’ve done it before.

As an academic or professional, plagiarizing seriously damages your reputation. You might also lose your research funding or your job, and you could even face legal consequences for copyright infringement.

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Academic Honesty and Avoiding Plagiarism

What is academic dishonesty.

• Introduction
• What is Plagiarism?
• What is Citation?
• When Do You Need to Cite?
• What Citation Style Do I Use?
• Citation in speeches and presentations
• To Cite or Not Cite? That is the Question!

Example #1: Cheating

Example #2: collusion, example #3: falsifying results & misrepresenting, why do students commit academically dishonest acts.

• How Do I Avoid Academic Dishonesty?
• What are the Consequences of Academic Dishonesty?
• Test Your Knowledge
• Questions? Ask a Librarian!

Plagiarism is a type of academic dishonesty. In all academic work, students are expected to submit materials that are their own and are to include attribution for any ideas or language that are not their own.

Additional examples of dishonest conduct include, but are not limited to:

• Cheating including giving and receiving information in examinations.
• Falsification of data, results or sources.
• Collusion, such as working with another person when independent work is assigned.
• Submitting the same paper or report for assignments in more than one course without permission (self-plagiarism).

Cheating  is the most well-known academically dishonest behavior.

But cheating includes more than just copying a neighbor’s answers on an exam or peeking at a cheat sheet or storing answers on your phone. Giving or offering information in examinations is also dishonest.

Turning in someone else’s work as your own is also considered cheating.

Ed Dante (a pseudonym) makes a living writing custom essays that unscrupulous students buy online. You can read his story at  The Chronicle of Higher Education . Purchasing someone else’s work and turning it in as your own is cheating.

Collusion , such as working with another person or persons when independent work is assigned is considered academically dishonesty.

While it is fine to work in a team if your faculty member specifically requires or allows it, be sure to communicate with your faculty about guidelines on permissible collaboration (including how to attribute the contributions of others).

In 2012,  125 Harvard students  were investigated for working together on a take-home final exam. The only rule on the exam was not to work together. Almost half of those students were determined to have cheated, and forced to withdraw from school for a year.

Falsifying results in studies or experiments is a serious breach of academic honesty.

Students are sometimes tempted to make up results if their study or experiment does not produce the results they hoped for. But getting caught has major consequences.  

Misrepresenting  yourself or your research is, by definition, dishonest.

Misrepresentation might include inflating credentials, claiming that a study proves something that it does not, or leaving out inconvenient and/or contradictory results.

An undergraduate at the University of Kansas claimed to be a researcher and promoted his (unfortunately incorrect) research on how much a Big Mac would cost if the U.S. raised minimum wage. His study was picked up by the Huffington Post, NY Times, and other major news outlets, who then had to publish retractions.

PRESSURE & OPPORTUNITIES

Pressure  is the most common reason students act dishonestly.  Situations include students feeling in danger of failing a course, financial pressure and fear of losing parental approval (Malgwi and Rakovski 14).

Opportunities  to cheat also influence students to act dishonestly including friends sharing information, the ease of storing information on devices, and lack of supervision in the classroom (Malgwi and Rakovski 14).

Malgwi, Charles A., and Carter Rakovski. " Behavioral Implications of Evaluating Determinants of Academic Fraud Risk Factors ."  Journal of Forensic & investigative Accounting,  vol. 1, no. 2,  2009, pp. 1-37. (pdf file)

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Central to any academic writing project is crediting (or citing) someone else' words or ideas. The following sites will help you understand academic writing expectations.

Academic integrity is truthful and responsible representation of yourself and your work by taking credit only for your own ideas and creations and giving credit to the work and ideas of other people. It involves providing attribution (citations and acknowledgments) whenever you include the intellectual property of others—and even your own if it is from a previous project or assignment. Academic integrity also means generating and using accurate data.

Responsible and ethical use of information is foundational to a successful teaching, learning, and research community. Not only does it promote an environment of trust and respect, it also facilitates intellectual conversations and inquiry. Citing your sources shows your expertise and assists others in their research by enabling them to find the original material. It is unfair and wrong to claim or imply that someone else’s work is your own.

Failure to uphold the values of academic integrity at the GSD can result in serious consequences, ranging from re-doing an assignment to expulsion from the program with a sanction on the student’s permanent record and transcript. Outside of academia, such infractions can result in lawsuits and damage to the perpetrator’s reputation and the reputation of their firm/organization. For more details see the Academic Integrity Policy at the GSD. 

The GSD’s Academic Integrity Tutorial can help build proficiency in recognizing and practicing ways to avoid plagiarism.

• Avoiding Plagiarism (Purdue OWL) This site has a useful summary with tips on how to avoid accidental plagiarism and a list of what does (and does not) need to be cited. It also includes suggestions of best practices for research and writing.
• How Not to Plagiarize (University of Toronto) Concise explanation and useful Q&A with examples of citing and integrating sources.

This fast-evolving technology is changing academia in ways we are still trying to understand, and both the GSD and Harvard more broadly are working to develop policies and procedures based on careful thought and exploration. At the moment, whether and how AI may be used in student work is left mostly to the discretion of individual instructors. There are some emerging guidelines, however, based on overarching values.

• Always ask first if AI is allowed and specifically when and how.
• Always check facts and sources generated by AI as these are not reliable.
• Cite your use of AI to generate text or images. Citation practices for AI are described in Using Sources and AI.

Since policies are changing rapidly, we recommend checking the links below often for new developments, and this page will continue to update as we learn more.

• Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) from HUIT Harvard's Information Technology team has put together this webpage explaining AI and curating resources about initial guidelines, recommendations for prompts, and recommendations of tools with a section specifically on image-based tools.
• Generative AI in Teaching and Learning at the GSD The GSD's evolving policies, information, and guidance for the use of generative AI in teaching and learning at the GSD are detailed here. The policies section includes questions to keep in mind about privacy and copyright, and the section on tools lists AI tools supported at the GSD.
• AI Code of Conduct by MetaLAB A Harvard-affiliated collaborative comprised of faculty and students sets out recommendations for guidelines for the use of AI in courses. The policies set out here are not necessarily adopted by the GSD, but they serve as a good framework for your own thinking about academic integrity and the ethical use of AI.
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Combating Academic Dishonesty, Part 1 – Understanding the Problem

by Thomas Keith | Feb 16, 2022 | Instructional design , Services

The Aims of This Series

Academic dishonesty – a term that encompasses a wide range of behaviors, from unauthorized collaboration and falsifying bibliographies to cheating on exams and buying pre-written essays – is a serious problem for higher education. Left unchecked, academic dishonesty can damage the culture of integrity that colleges and universities seek to promote, and it can even undermine the value of a degree from a given institution.

Not surprisingly, much attention has been paid to how to combat academic dishonesty. Literature on the subject, especially articles aimed at a general audience, tends to echo certain assumptions: that dishonest behavior is on the rise; that technologies such as the Internet and online learning have exacerbated the problem; and that technological tools for surveillance, such as online proctoring software or plagiarism checkers, are vital if the problem is to be curbed.

In this blog series, we will examine – and challenge – these assumptions. In the first installment, we will explore the scholarly literature to consider whether academic dishonesty is truly a growing problem and what its causes are. Subsequent installments will present strategies for promoting academic integrity in the classroom, with a focus on technology. We will consider what technology can do, and (just as importantly) what it cannot do, to prevent academic dishonesty.

Is the Problem Getting Worse?

Many media narratives take for granted that academic dishonesty – usually referred to by the popular term “cheating” – is worse today than it has ever been. Explanations for this include the easy availability of information on the Internet; the ubiquity of cell phones, which make sending and receiving messages easy; and, more broadly, a moral decline in society, with students taking an instrumentalist view of their education: grades are all that matter, and any method of securing a good grade is legitimate.

Going hand in hand with this narrative is a valorization of the notion of “control”. Bluntly put, if students are given the opportunity to cheat (so the thinking runs) they invariably will cheat. Thus, the key to academic integrity is hemming students in with controls that deprive them of any opportunity to behave dishonestly. Take away their laptops and cell phones; proctor them closely, whether in-person or online; check their work against databases of previous student work to find possible plagiarism; and so forth.

The COVID-19 pandemic has proven to be something of a laboratory for testing these claims. In the early days of the pandemic, when most colleges and universities made an emergency shift to remote instruction, there was an astronomical jump (nearly 200%) in questions submitted to the controversial “homework help” website Chegg (Redden 2021). Such data appeared to confirm widespread fears that students were taking advantage of the online environment to behave dishonestly. Deprived of the ability to proctor exams in-person, many institutions that had not previously used an online proctoring solution raced to adopt one (Flaherty 2020).  Their decision found support in scholarly literature that argued proctoring is necessary, as students are more likely to consider cheating acceptable when an exam is unproctored (Dyer, Pettyjohn, and Saladin 2020). The University of Chicago itself set up an agreement with the online proctoring service Proctorio , although Academic Technology Solutions did not encourage its use.

This approach, however, has not been without pushback. Advocates of “compassionate pedagogy,” such as Jesse Stommel in his keynote at the 2021 Symposium for Teaching with Technology , have pointed out that claims of rampant cheating are often based on emotion rather than evidence. Furthermore, in the unprecedented and nightmarish circumstances of the pandemic, students reaching out for help wherever they can find it should not be taken as evidence of a moral collapse, but rather as an understandable coping strategy.

There is also empirical evidence that problematizes the narrative of skyrocketing academic dishonesty. Donald McCabe and Linda Trevino, in a longitudinal study, found that the percentage of students self-reporting dishonest behavior remained fairly constant between 1963 and 1993 (McCabe and Trevino 1996). Admittedly, this study predated the Internet and other technologies that may enable academic dishonesty, and it did find that certain types of cheating (notably unauthorized collaboration, which we will delve into in greater detail in future installments) were on the rise; nonetheless, it remains suggestive.

On a more fundamental level, though, it is worth considering why students may commit acts of academic dishonesty. If we look beyond a straightforward narrative of moral decline, we see that there are contextual factors that can make academic dishonesty more or less likely; most of these factors are not new, but they have long shaped the classroom environment. This discovery has important implications for our attitude toward technology. It can be argued (and, in subsequent installments, will be argued) that while technology does have a role to play in helping to promote academic integrity, no tool or piece of software is a panacea. Furthermore, we will show that many of the most important steps faculty and administrators can take to combat academic dishonesty have nothing to do with technology and everything to do with thoughtful, compassionate pedagogy.

Why Do Students Cheat?

There is, of course, no one answer to why students may choose to engage in academically dishonest behaviors. Empirical research, however, has identified certain factors that increase the likelihood of academic dishonesty. Some of these are personal; others are contextual. Our focus here will be on the latter, inasmuch as the individual faculty member or administrator has more control over them.

It has been shown repeatedly that peer attitudes and behavior are vital. If students perceive that their peers consider academic dishonesty acceptable, they are significantly more likely to behave dishonestly themselves (McCabe and Trevino 1997). Conversely, when a college or university has a strong culture of integrity – for example, an honor code that spells out student privileges and obligations – peer pressure can be a positive force, discouraging students from behaving dishonestly (McCabe, Trevino, and Butterfield 1999).

Problems of understanding what, in fact, academic dishonesty is can also lead to trouble. Many students come out of high school with a weak, if not nonexistent, understanding of such basic academic notions as how to cite sources properly. They may consider some academically dishonest behaviors as perfectly acceptable that faculty and administrators would condemn (Nelson, Nelson, and Tichenor 2013). Cultural differences can further cloud the picture. If a student is a non-native English speaker, for instance, he or she may struggle to understand the very concept of plagiarism – which, it must be borne in mind, is based upon a distinctly Western understanding of proper source usage (Click 2012).

Finally, the classroom environment itself is a powerful factor in shaping student attitudes. Student engagement is vital: if students feel that they are receiving personal attention and that the tasks their instructor assigns are meaningful, they are less likely to behave dishonestly. Conversely, if they feel a sense of alienation or “depersonalization,” or if they believe they are merely being given “busy work” with no pedagogical worth, the chances of their behaving dishonestly increase markedly (Pulvers and Diekhoff 1999). This danger is particularly acute in very large classes and in classes held online. The more a student feels that he or she is just a number (or a grade), the less restraint he or she is likely to feel about violating norms of conduct.

These conclusions will shape our analysis going forward. In Part 2, “Small Steps to Discourage Academic Dishonesty,” we will look at immediate, short-term steps that faculty and instructors can take to make academic dishonesty less likely. In Part 3, “Towards a Pedagogy of Academic Integrity,” we will step back and introduce broader pedagogical considerations, which require more time and effort to implement but which are also likely to have greater impact overall in reducing dishonest behavior.

Works Cited

Click, Amanda. “Issues of Plagiarism and Academic Integrity for Second-Language Students.” MELA Notes no. 85 (2012), pp. 44-53. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23392491

Dyer, Jarrett A., Heidi C. Pettyjohn, and Steve Saladin. “Academic Dishonesty and Testing: How Student Beliefs and Test Settings Impact Decisions to Cheat”. Journal of the National College Testing Association vol. 4 issue 1 (2020), pp. 1-30. https://www.ncta-testing.org/assets/docs/JNCTA/2020%20-%20JNCTA%20-%20Academic%20Dishonesty%20and%20Testing.pdf

Flaherty, Colleen. Online proctoring is surging during COVID-19 ( Inside Higher Ed , May 11, 2020)

McCabe, Donald L., and Linda Klebe Trevino. “What We Know about Cheating in College: Longitudinal Trends and Recent Developments.” Change vol. 28 no. 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1996), pp. 28-33. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40177789

McCabe, Donald L., and Linda Klebe Trevino. “Individual and Contextual Influences on Academic Dishonesty: A Multicampus Investigation.” Research in Higher Education vol. 38 no. 3  (Jun. 1997), pp. 379-396. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40196302

McCabe, Donald L., Linda Klebe Trevino, and Kenneth D. Butterfield. “Academic Integrity in Honor Code and Non-Honor Code Environments: A Qualitative Investigation.” Journal of Higher Education vol. 70 no. 2 (Mar.-Apr. 1999), pp. 211-234. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2649128

Nelson, Lynda P., Rodney K. Nelson, and Linda Tichenor. “Understanding Today’s Students: Entry-Level Science Student Involvement in Academic Dishonesty.” Journal of College Science Teaching vol. 42 no. 3 (Jan./Feb. 2013), pp. 52-57. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43631795

Pulvers, Kim, and George M. Diekhoff. “The Relationship between Academic Dishonesty and College Classroom Environment.” Research in Higher Education vol. 40 no. 4 (Aug. 1999), pp. 487-498. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40196358

Redden, Elizabeth. Study finds nearly 200 percent jump in questions submitted to Chegg after start of pandemic ( Inside Higher Ed , Feb. 5, 2021)

(Splash image by Okta_Aderama_Putra on Pixabay )

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Plagiarism & Academic Integrity

• Academic Integrity

Types of Academic Dishonesty

• How to Avoid Plagiarism: Citing
• Citing Direct Quotes
• Paraphrasing
• Summarizing
• Try It! Identifying Plagiarism
• Understanding a Turnitin Report

There are many types of academic dishonesty - some are obvious, while some are less obvious.

• Misrepresentation ;
• Conspiracy ;
• Fabrication ;
• Collusion ;
• Duplicate Submission ;
• Academic Misconduct ;
• Improper Computer/Calculator Use ;
• Improper Online, TeleWeb, and Blended Course Use ;
• Disruptive Behavior ;
• and last, but certainly not least, PLAGIARISM .

We will discuss each of these types of academic dishonesty in more detail below. Plagiarism is the most common type of academic dishonesty, and also the easiest type to commit on accident! See the plagiarism page for more info about what plagiarism is and how to avoid it in your work.

Cheating is taking or giving any information or material which will be used to determine academic credit.

  Examples of cheating include:

• Copying from another student's test or homework.
• Allowing another student to copy from your test or homework.
• Using materials such as textbooks, notes, or formula lists during a test without the professor's permission.
• Collaborating on an in-class or take-home test without the professor's permission.
• Having someone else write or plan a paper for you.

  Bribery takes on two forms:

• Bribing someone for an academic advantage, or accepting such a bribe (i.e. a student offers a professor money, goods, or services in exchange for a passing grade, or a professor accepts this bribe).
• Using an academic advantage as a bribe (i.e. a professor offers a student a passing grade in exchange for money, goods, or services, or a student accepts this bribe).

Misrepresentation

Misrepresentation is any act or omission that is intented to deceive an instructor for academic advantage. Misrepresentation includes lying to an instructor in an attempt to increase your grade, or lying to an instructor when confronted with allegations of academic dishonesty.

Conspiracy means working together with one or more persons to commit or attempt to commit academic dishonesty.

Fabrication

Fabrication is the use of invented or misrepresentative information. Fabrication most often occurs in the sciences, when students create or alter experimental data. Listing a source in your works cited that you did not actually use in your research is also fabrication.

Collusion is the act of two or more students working together on an individual assignment.

Duplicate Submission

A duplicate submission means a student submits the same paper for two different classes. If a student submits the same paper for two different classes within the same semester, the student must have the permission of both instructors. If a student submits the same paper for two different classes in different semesters, the student must have the permission of their current instructor.

Academic Misconduct

Academic misconduct is the violation of college policies by tampering with grades or by obtaining and/or distributing any part of a test or assignment. For example:

• Obtaining a copy of a test before the test is admisistered.
• Distributing, either for money or for free, a test before it is administered.
• Encouraging others to obtain a copy of a test before the test is administered.
• Changing grades in a gradebook, on a computer, or on an assignment.
• Continuing to work on a test after time is called.

Improper Computer/Calculator Use

Improper computer/calculator use includes:

• Unauthorized use of computer or calculator programs.
• Selling or giving away information stored on a computer or calculator which will be submitted for a grade.
• Sharing test or assignment answers on a calculator or computer.

Improper Online, TeleWeb, and Blended Course Use

Improper online, teleweb, and blended course use includes:

• Accepting or providing outside help on online assignments or tests.
• Obtaining test materials or questions before the test is administered.

Disruptive Behavior

Disruptive behavior is any behavior that interfers with the teaching/learning process. Disruptive bahavior includes:

• Disrespecting a professor or another student, in class or online.
• Talking, texting, or viewing material unrelated to the course during a lecture.
• Failing to silence your cell phone during class.
• Posting inappropriate material or material unrealted to the course on discussion boards.
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Promoting Academic Integrity 

While it is each student’s responsibility to understand and abide by university standards towards individual work and academic integrity, instructors can help students understand their responsibilities through frank classroom conversations that go beyond policy language to shared values. By creating a learning environment that stimulates engagement and designing assessments that are authentic, instructors can minimize the incidence of academic dishonesty.

Academic dishonesty often takes place because students are overwhelmed with the assignments and they don’t have enough time to complete them. So, in addition to being clear about expectations and responsibilities related to academic integrity, instructors should also invite students to  plan accordingly and communicate with them in the event of an emergency. Instructors can arrange extensions and offer solutions in case that students have an emergency. Communication between instructors and students is vital to avoid bad practices and contribute to hold on to the academic integrity values. 

The guidance and strategies included in this resource are applicable to courses in any modality (in-person, online, and hybrid) and includes a discussion of addressing generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT with students. 

On this page:

What is academic integrity, why does academic dishonesty occur, strategies for promoting academic integrity, academic integrity in the age of artificial intelligence, columbia university resources.

• References and Additional Resources
• Acknowledgment

Cite this resource: Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning (2020). Promoting Academic Integrity. Columbia University. Retrieved [today’s date] from https://ctl.columbia.edu/resources-and-technology/resources/academic-integrity/

According to the  International Center for Academic Integrity , academic integrity is “a commitment, even in the face of adversity, to six fundamental values: honesty, trust, fairness, respect, responsibility, and courage.” We commit to these values to honor the intellectual efforts of the global academic community, of which Columbia University is an integral part.

Academic dishonesty in the classroom occurs when one or more values of academic integrity are violated. While some cases of academic dishonesty are committed intentionally, other cases may be a reflection of something deeper that a student is experiencing, such as language or cultural misunderstandings, insufficient or misguided preparation for exams or papers, a lack of confidence in their ability to learn the subject, or perception that course policies are unfair (Bernard and Keith-Spiegel, 2002).

Some other reasons why students may commit academic dishonesty include:

• Cultural or regional differences in what comprises academic dishonesty
• Lack or poor understanding on how to cite sources correctly
• Misunderstanding directions and/or expectations
• Poor time management, procrastination, or disorganization
• Feeling disconnected from the course, subject, instructor, or material
• Fear of failure or lack of confidence in one’s ability
• Anxiety, depression, other mental health problems
• Peer/family pressure to meet unrealistic expectations

Understanding some of these common reasons can help instructors intentionally design their courses and assessments to pre-empt, and hopefully avoid, instances of academic dishonesty. As Thomas Keith states in “Combating Academic Dishonesty, Part 1 – Understanding the Problem.” faculty and administrators should direct their steps towards a “thoughtful, compassionate pedagogy.”

The CTL is here to help!

The CTL can help you think through your course policies and ways to create community, design course assessments, and set up CourseWorks to promote academic integrity. Email [email protected] to schedule your 1-1 consultation .

In his research on cheating in the college classroom, James Lang argues that “the amount of cheating that takes place on our campuses may well depend on the structures of the learning environment” (Lang, 2013a; Lang, 2013b). Instructors have agency in shaping the classroom learning experience; thus, instances of academic dishonesty can be mitigated by efforts to design a supportive, learning-oriented environment (Bertam, 2017 and 2008).

Understanding Student’s Perceptions about Cheating 

It is important to know how students understand critical concepts related to academic integrity such as: cheating, transparency, attribution, intellectual property, etc. As much as they know and understand these concepts, they will be able to show good academic integrity practices.

1. Acknowledge the importance of the research process, not only the outcome, during student learning.

Although the research process is slow and arduous, students should understand the value of the different processes involved during academic writing: investigation, reading, drafting, revising, editing and proof-reading. For Natalie Wexler, using generative Artificial Intelligence tools like ChatGPT as a substitute of writing itself is beyond cheating, an act of self cheating: “The process of writing itself can and should deepen that knowledge and possibly spark new insights” (“‘ Bots’ Can Write Good Essays, But That Doesn’t Make Writing Obsolete” ).

Ways to understand the value of writing their own work without external help, either from external sources, peers or AI, hinge on prioritizing the process over the product:

• Asking students to present drafts of their work and receive feedback can help students to gain confidence to continue researching and writing.
• Allowing students the freedom to choose or change their research topic can increase their investment in an assignment, which can motivate them to conduct their own writing and research rather than relying on AI tools. 

2. Create a supportive learning environment

When students feel supported in a course and connected to instructors and/or TAs and their peers, they may be more comfortable asking for help when they don’t understand course material or if they have fallen behind with an assignment.

Ways to support student learning include:

• Convey confidence  in your students’ ability to succeed in your course from day one of the course (this may ease student anxiety or  imposter syndrome ) and through timely and regular feedback on what they are doing well and areas they can improve on. 
• Explain the relevance  of the course to students; tell them why it is important that they actually learn the material and develop the skills for themselves. Invite students to connect the course to their goals, studies, or intended career trajectories. Research shows that students’ motivation to learn can help deter instances of academic dishonesty (Lang, 2013a). 
• Teach important skills  such as taking notes, summarizing arguments, and citing sources. Students may not have developed these skills, or they may bring bad habits from previous learning experiences. Have students practice these skills through exercises (Gonzalez, 2017). 
• Provide students multiple opportunities to practice challenging skills  and receive immediate feedback in class (e.g., polls, writing activities, “boardwork”). These frequent low-stakes assessments across the semester can “[improve] students’ metacognitive awareness of their learning in the course” (Lang, 2013a, pp. 145). 
• Help students manage their time  on course tasks by scheduling regular check-ins to reduce students’ last minute efforts or frantic emails about assignment requirements. Establish weekly online office hours and/or be open to appointments outside of standard working hours. This is especially important if students are learning in different time zones. Normalize the use of campus resources and academic support resources that can help address issues or anxieties they may be facing.  (See the Columbia University Resources section below for a list of support resources.)
• Provide lists of approved websites and resources  that can be used for additional help or research. This is especially important if on-campus materials are not available to online learners. Articulate permitted online “study” resources to be used as learning tools (and not cheating aids – see McKenzie, 2018) and how to cite those in homework, writing assignments or problem sets. 
• Encourage TAs (if applicable) to establish good relationships  with students and to check-in with you about concerns they may have about students in the course. (Explore the  Working with TAs Online  resource to learn more about partnering with TAs.)

3. Clarify expectations and establish shared values

In addition to including Columbia’s  academic integrity policy  on syllabi, go a step further by creating space in the classroom to discuss your expectations regarding academic integrity and what that looks like in your course context. After all, “what reduces cheating on an honor code campus is not the code itself, but  the dialogue about academic honesty that the code inspires. ” (Lang, 2013a, pp. 172)

Ways to cultivate a shared sense of responsibility for upholding academic integrity include: 

• Ask students to identify goals and expectations  around academic integrity in relation to course learning objectives. 
• Communicate your expectations  and explain your rationale for course policies on artificial intelligence tools, collaborative assignments, late work, proctored exams, missed tests, attendance, extra credit, the use of plagiarism detection software or proctoring software, etc. It will make a difference to take the time at the beginning of the course to explain differences between quoting, summarizing and paraphrasing. Providing examples of good and bad quotation/paraphrasing will help students to know what constitutes good academic writing. 
• Define and provide examples  for what constitutes plagiarism or other forms of academic dishonesty in your course.
• Invite students to generate ideas  for responding to scenarios where they may be pressured to violate the values of academic integrity (e.g.: a friend asks to see their homework, or a friend suggests using chat apps during exams), so students are prepared to react with integrity when suddenly faced with these situations. 
• State clearly when collaboration and group learning is permitted  and when independent work is expected. Collaboration and group work provide great opportunities to build student-student rapport and classroom community, but at the same time, it can lead students to fall into academic misconduct due to unintended collaboration/failure to safeguard their work.
• Discuss the ethical, academic, and legal repercussions  of posting class recordings, notes and/or class materials online (e.g., to sites such as Chegg, GitHub, CourseHero – see Lederman, 2020).
• Partner with TAs  (if applicable) and clarify your expectations of them, how they can help promote shared values around academic integrity, and what they should do in cases of suspected cheating or classroom difficulties

4. Design assessments to maximize learning and minimize pressure

High stakes course assessments can be a source of student anxiety. Creating multiple opportunities for students to demonstrate their learning, and spreading assessments  throughout  the semester can lessen student stress and keep the focus on student learning (see  Darby, 2020  for strategies on assessing students online). As Lang explains, “The more assessments you provide, the less pressure you put on students to do well on any single assignment or exam. If you maintain a clear and consistent academic integrity policy, and ensure that all students caught cheating receive an immediate and substantive penalty, the benefit of cheating on any one assessment will be small, while the potential consequences will be high” (Lang, 2013a and Lang, 2013c). For support with creating online exams, please please refer to our  Creating Online Exams resource .

Ways to enhance one’s assessment approach:

• Design assignments  based on authentic problems in your discipline. Ask students to  apply  course concepts and materials to a problem or concept. 
• Structure assignments into smaller parts  (“scaffolding”) that will be submitted and checked throughout the semester. This scaffolding can also help students learn how to tackle large projects by breaking down the tasks. 
• Break up a single high-stakes exam  into smaller, weekly tests. This can help distribute the weight of grades, and will lessen the pressure students feel when an exam accounts for a large portion of their grade. 
• Give students options  in how their learning is assessed and/or invite students to present their learning in creative ways (e.g., as a poster, video, story, art project, presentation, or oral exam).
• Provide feedback prior to grading  student work. Give students the opportunity to implement the feedback. The revision process encourages student learning, while also lowering the anxiety around any one assignment. 
• Utilize multiple low-stakes assignments  that prepare students for high-stakes assignments or exams to reduce anxiety (e.g., in-class activities, in-class or online discussions)
• Create grading rubrics and share them  with your students and TAs (if applicable) so that expectations are clear, to guide student work, and aid with the feedback process.  
• Use individual student portfolio folders  and provide tailored feedback to students throughout the semester. This can help foster positive relationships, as well as allow you to watch students’ progress on drafts and outlines. You can also ask students to describe how their drafts have changed and offer rationales for those decisions.
• For exams , consider refreshing tests every term, both in terms of organization and content. Additionally, ground your assignments by having students draw connections between course content and the unique experience of your course in terms of time (unique to the semester), place (unique to campus, local community, etc. ), personal (specific student experiences), and interdisciplinary opportunities (other courses students have taken, co-curricular activities, campus events, etc.). (Lang, 2013a, pp. 77).

Since its release, ChatGPT has raised concern in universities across the country about the opportunity it presents for students to cheat and appropriate AI ideas, texts, and even code as their own work. However, there are also potential positive uses of this tool in the learning process–including as a tool for teachers to rely on when creating assessments or working with repetitive and time-consuming tasks.

Possible Advantages of ChatGPT

Due to the novelty of this tool, the possible advantages that might present in the teaching-learning process should be under the control of each instructor since they know exactly what they expect from students’ work. 

Prof. Ethan Mollick teaches innovation and entrepreneurship at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and has been openly sharing on his Twitter account his journey incorporating ChatGPT into his classes. Prof. Mollick advises his students to experiment with this tool, trying and retrying prompts. He recognizes the importance of acknowledging its limits and the risks of violating academic honesty guidelines if the use of this tool is not stated at the end of the assignment.

Prof. Mollick uncovers four possible uses of this AI tool, ranging from using ChatGPT as an all-knowing intern, as a game designer, as an assistant to launch a business, or even to “hallucinate” together ( “Four Paths to the Revelation” ). For Prof. Mollick, ChatGPT is a useful technology to craft initial ideas, as long as the prompts are given within a specific field, include proper context, step-by-step directions and have the proper changes and edits.

Resources for faculty: 

• Academic Integrity Best Practices for Faculty (Columbia College & School of Engineering and Applied Sciences)
• Faculty Statement on Academic Integrity (Columbia College)
• FAQs: Academic Integrity from Columbia Student Conduct and Community Standards 
• Ombuds Office for assistance with academic dishonesty issues. 
• Columbia Center of Artificial Intelligence Technology

Resources for students: 

• Policies from Columbia Student Conduct and Community Standards
• Understanding the Academic Integrity Policy (Columbia College & School of Engineering and Applied Sciences)

Student support resources:

• Maximizing Student Learning Online (Columbia Online)
• Center for Student Advising Tutoring Service (Berick Center for Student Advising)
• Help Rooms and Private Tutors by Department (Berick Center for Student Advising
• Peer Academic Skills Consultants (Berick Center for Student Advising)
• Academic Resource Center (ARC) for School of General Studies
• Center for Engaged Pedagogy (Barnard College)
• Writing Center (for Columbia undergraduate and graduate students)
• Counseling and Psychological Services
• Disability Services

For graduate students: 

• Writing Studio (Graduate School of Arts and Sciences)
• Student Center (Graduate School of Arts and Sciences)
• Teachers College

Columbia University Information Technology (CUIT) CUIT’s Academic Services provides services that can be used by instructors in their courses such as Turnitin , a plagiarism detection service and online proctoring services such as Proctorio , a remote proctoring service that monitors students taking virtual exams through CourseWorks. 

Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) The CTL can help you think through your course policies, ways to create community, design course assessments, and setting up CourseWorks to promote integrity, among other teaching and learning facets. To schedule a one-on-one consultation, please contact the CTL at [email protected] . 

References 

Bernard, W. Jr. and Keith-Spiegel, P. (2002).  Academic Dishonesty: An Educator’s Guide . Mahwah, NJ: Psychology Press.

Bertram Gallant, T. (2017).  Academic Integrity as a Teaching and Learning Issue: From Theory to Practice .  Theory Into Practice,  56(2), 88-94.

Bertram Gallant, T. (Ed.). (2008).  Academic Integrity in the Twenty-First Century: A Teaching and Learning Imperative .  ASHE Higher Education Report . 33(5), 1-143. 

Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning (2020).  Creating Online Exams . 

Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning (2020).  Working with TAs online . 

Darby, F. (2020).  7 Ways to Assess Students Online and Minimize Cheating .  The Chronicle of Higher Education.  

Gonzalez, J. (2017, February).  Teaching Students to Avoid Plagiarism . Cult of Pedagogy, 26.

International Center for Academic Integrity (2023).  Fundamental Values of Academic Integrity .

International Center on Academic Integrity (2023).  https://academicintegrity.org/

Keith, T. Combating Academic Dishonesty, Part 1 – Understanding the Problem. The University of Chicago. (2022, Feb 16).

Lang, J.M. (2013a).  Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty . Harvard University Press.

Lang, J. M. (2013b).  Cheating Lessons, Part 1 .  The Chronicle of Higher Education. 

Lang, J. M. (2013c).  Cheating Lessons, Part 2 .  The Chronicle of Higher Education. 

Lederman, D. (2020, February 19).  Course Hero Woos Professors . Inside Higher Ed. 

McKenzie, L. (2018, May 8).  Learning Tool or Cheating Aid?   Inside Higher Ed.

Marche, S. (2022, Dec 6). The College Essay is Dead. The Atlantic.

Mollick, E. (2023, Jan 17). All my Classes Suddenly Became AI Classes. One Useful Thing.

Mollick, Ethan. (2022, Dic 8). Four Paths to the Revelation. One Useful Thing.

Wexler, N. Bots’ Can Write Good Essays, But That Doesn’t Make Writing Obsolete. Minding the Gap.

Additional Resources

Bretag, T. (Ed.). (2016). Handbook of Academic Integrity. Singapore: Springer Publishing.

Ormand, C. (2017 March 6).  SAGE Musings: Minimizing and Dealing with Academic Dishonesty . SAGE 2YC: 2YC Faculty as Agents of Change.

WCET (2009).  Best Practice Strategies to Promote Academic Integrity in Online Education .

Thomas, K.  (2022 February 16). Combating Academic Dishonesty, Part 1 – Understanding the Problem. The University of Chicago. Academic Technology Solutions.

______. (2022 February 25). Combating Academic Dishonesty, Part 2: Small Steps to Discourage Academic Dishonesty. The University of Chicago. Academic Technology Solutions.

______.  (2022 April 28). Combating Academic Dishonesty, Part 3: Towards a Pedagogy of Academic Integrity. The University of Chicago. Academic Technology Solutions.

______.  (2022 June 7). Combating Academic Dishonesty, Part 4: Library Services to Support Academic Honesty. The University of Chicago. Academic Technology Solutions.

Acknowledgement

This resource was adapted from the faculty booklet  Promoting Academic Integrity & Preventing Academic Dishonesty: Best Practices at Columbia University  developed by Victoria Malaney Brown, Director of Academic Integrity at Columbia College and Columbia Engineering, Abigail MacBain and Ramón Flores Pinedo, PhD students in GSAS. We would like to thank them for their extensive support in creating this academic integrity resource.

Want to communicate your expectations around AI tools?

See the CTL’s resource “Considerations for AI Tools in the Classroom.”

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Academic Integrity at MIT

A handbook for students, search form, what are the consequences.

The consequences for cheating, plagiarism, unauthorized collaboration, and other forms of academic dishonesty can be very serious, possibly including suspension or expulsion from the Institute. Any violation of the rules outlined in this handbook, established by the instructor of the class, or deviating from responsible conduct of research, may be considered violations of academic integrity. The MIT Policy on Student Academic Dishonesty is outlined in MIT’s Policies and Procedures 10.2 .

Instructors, research or thesis supervisors decide how to handle violations of academic integrity on a case-by-case basis, and three options exist. Questions about these options should be directed to the Office of Student conduct ( [email protected] ).

Academic consequences within a class or research project

Within a class, the instructor determines what action is appropriate to take. Such action may include:

requiring the student to redo the assignment for a reduced grade.

assigning the student a failing grade for the assignment.

assigning the student a failing grade for the class.

For a research project, the supervisor determines what action is appropriate to take. Such action may include:

• terminating the student's participation in the research project.

The instructor or supervisor may also submit documentation to the Office of Student Citizenship in the form of a letter to file or a formal complaint. These options are outlined below.

Letter to file

The instructor or supervisor writes a letter describing the nature of the academic integrity violation, which is placed in the student’s discipline file. The student’s discipline file is maintained by the Office of Student Citizenship (OSC) and is not associated with the student’s academic record .

A letter may be filed with the OSC in addition to the action already taken in the class or research project.

If a student receives a letter to file, s/he has the right to:

submit a reply, that is added to the student’s file.

appeal the letter to the Committee on Discipline (COD) for a full hearing.

In resolving the violation described in the letter, the OSC reviews any previous violations which are documented in the student’s discipline file.

Committee on Discipline (COD) complaint

The instructor or supervisor submits a formal complaint to the COD, which resolves cases of alleged student misconduct.

This complaint may be filed with the OSC in addition to the action already taken in the class or research project.

A COD complaint is reviewed by the COD Chair and considered for a hearing. Any previous violations documented in the student’s discipline file are reviewed as part of this process.

Cases resulting in a hearing are subject to a full range of sanctions, including probation, suspension, dismissal, or other educational sanctions.

Policies, Procedures, and Contacts

• MIT Policy on Student Academic Dishonesty
• Typical MIT Student Discipline Process Outline
• Committee on Discipline Rules and Regulations
• Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards
• For Faculty and Staff: What You Should Know about Academic Integrity

• +44 (0) 207 391 9032

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Academic integrity and academic dishonesty are terms that are frequently mentioned in educational settings, but understanding their full implications is essential for students, educators, and institutions alike. This article explores what academic integrity is, the principles of academic honesty and what academic dishonesty entails, and provides examples of both to clarify the key differences.

What is Academic Integrity?

Academic integrity refers to the ethical standards and moral code followed in the academic world. It encompasses values such as honesty, trust, fairness, respect, and responsibility. Upholding academic integrity means that students and scholars commit to producing work that is genuine, original, and reflective of their own understanding and effort.

Core Principles of Academic Integrity

• Honesty : Being truthful in all academic endeavours.
• Trust : Establishing mutual respect and confidence between educators and students.
• Fairness : Ensuring equal opportunities and treatment for all students.
• Responsibility : Taking accountability for one’s actions and learning process.

Academic Integrity Examples

• Proper Citation : Correctly citing all sources of information and ideas that are not your own.
• Original Work : Submitting assignments and research that are entirely your own creation.
• Honest Collaboration : Working with peers only when it is allowed and making sure to acknowledge their contributions.
• Reporting Misconduct : Informing authorities about any instances of academic dishonesty you encounter.
• Preparation and Effort : Completing all assignments to the best of your ability without resorting to shortcuts or unethical practices.

What is Academic Dishonesty?

Academic dishonesty, on the other hand, involves actions that violate these ethical standards and principles. It includes any form of cheating, plagiarism, fabrication, and other deceitful practices that compromise the integrity of the educational process.

Academic Dishonesty Examples

• Plagiarism : Using someone else's work, ideas, or expressions without proper acknowledgement. This can include copying text from a book, website, or another student's paper.
• Cheating : Using unauthorised materials or receiving assistance during an examination. This can involve anything from bringing notes into an exam to obtaining answers from another student.
• Fabrication : Falsifying or inventing information, data, or citations in academic assignments.
• Collusion : Collaborating with others on assignments that are meant to be completed individually.
• Impersonation : Pretending to be another student or having someone else pretend to be you in an examination or other academic activity.

Consequences of Academic Dishonesty

Engaging in academic dishonesty can have severe consequences, impacting a student's academic and professional future. These repercussions can include:

Academic Penalties : Institutions often impose strict penalties on those found guilty of academic dishonesty. These can range from failing the assignment or course to suspension or even expulsion from the institution.

Loss of Reputation : A record of academic dishonesty can tarnish a student’s reputation, affecting relationships with peers, professors, and future employers. It can also result in loss of scholarships or other academic honours.

Legal Ramifications : In some cases, particularly those involving significant fraud or impersonation, legal action may be taken against the offending student.

Personal Consequences : Beyond institutional and legal penalties, students may suffer from personal guilt, loss of self-respect, and damaged relationships due to their dishonest actions.

The Importance of Academic Integrity

When students commit to academic honesty, they develop critical thinking skills by engaging deeply with the material, which enhances understanding and fosters critical analysis. Additionally, maintaining integrity in academic work helps build a strong reputation, benefiting future educational and career opportunities. Furthermore, honest efforts lead to genuine learning and self-improvement, fostering personal growth.

Maintaining high standards of academic integrity ensures that institutions preserve academic standards by protecting the value and credibility of their qualifications. It also promotes a culture of trust, encouraging honesty and responsibility to foster a positive learning environment. Additionally, adhering to ethical standards helps prevent legal disputes and maintains the institution's reputation.

How to Uphold Academic Integrity

To maintain academic integrity, it is essential to understand your institution's policies and ensure you are clear about what is expected of you. Developing good study habits is equally important; allocate sufficient time for studying and completing assignments to avoid the temptation of taking shortcuts. Additionally, learning how to cite sources correctly is crucial for avoiding plagiarism . If you find yourself struggling with your coursework, seek help from tutors, professors, or academic support services instead of resorting to dishonest practices. Reflect on the importance of integrity in both your personal and professional life, and let these values guide your academic endeavours.

Understanding the key differences between academic integrity and academic dishonesty is fundamental for anyone involved in education. Academic integrity is about committing to honesty, trust, fairness, respect, and responsibility, while academic dishonesty undermines these values and compromises the educational process.

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Academic Honesty Essay

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Introduction

Academic honesty, dishonest conduct, preventing academic dishonesty.

Lately, academic honesty has become a major issue among the elite in the academic environments. It can no longer be simply defined as the carrying of illegal materials into the exam rooms or copying someone else’s work. Indeed, with growth in technology like smart phones and emergence of the use of internet in research work has caused administrators in universities and colleges to extend the definition of academic honesty or dishonesty.

Academic honesty involves the students submitting work that is originally theirs and inclusion of the cited sources in their work. The academic community is generally aware that it is not possible for students to come up with their own original work and therefore, allow inclusion of other people’s work in form of direct quotes of paraphrases only if the original author is appropriately acknowledged. Academic honesty takes different forms and addresses in various aspects in schools and colleges.

Academic honesty is considered important because the results obtained from schools or colleges are referred to in future. Future employers refer to these documents when assessing the abilities and gifts of the students before actual employment.

Therefore, high levels of integrity should be adhered to in order to ensure quality reports and accurate assessment of the student’s abilities and potential (Vegh, 2009). Students commit academic dishonesty when they engage in activities that are classified in four general types; namely, cheating, dishonest conduct, plagiarism and collusion.

Cheating is the most ancient form of academic dishonesty known in history. It takes different forms whereby the rules and regulations governing formal or informal examinations are violated. For instance, copying other people’s work during examination, sharing one’s answers with another during examinations, or submission of other people’s work, as one’s own original work.

During examinations, invigilators are placed strategically in the exam room to monitor the behavior of students but some students attempt to share answers (Vegh, 2009). A student is not allowed to communicate to their fellow students in an exam room without the express permission of the invigilator and a violation of these rule amounts to cheating. Taking an examination on behalf of another student also amounts to cheating. Generally, cheating offers unfair advantage to the students involved over the rest.

Unfair advantage could also be meted on students when they commit dishonest conducts like stealing examination or answer keys from the instructor. Desperate times call for desperate measures and students are capable of doing anything to rescue their dreams of scooping first class honors.

Such cases have been reported severally and they can be classified as dishonest conduct (“What is Academic Dishonesty”, 1996, p.77). Further, students who try to change official academic results without following the procedures laid by the respective academic institutions commit dishonest conducts. Obtaining answers before the actual exam or altering records after certification leads to low academic standards.

Plagiarism is the recent form of violating academic honesty and defined as intellectual theft. The crime comes in when one makes use of another person’s findings, as if his/hers, without giving the due credit to the source. Plagiarism takes the form of stealing other people’s ideas or words and the form of use of other people’s work without crediting the source properly.

The sources mentioned here include articles from electronic journals, newspaper articles, published books, and even websites (Bouchard, 2010). The internet has become a source of information for research and the easy accessibility and convenience of the same provides a temptation to the students to copy and paste other people’s work.

However, it amounts to plagiarism and is classified as a violation of academic honesty. Though plagiarism can be either intentional or unintentional on the part of the student, it still amounts to academic dishonesty either way. Students should therefore be careful to ensure that their work is free of any form of plagiarism.

Academic institutions have come up with measures to curb the spread of academic dishonesty to maintain the credibility of their programs. Academic dishonesty leads to production of half-baked graduates who lower the standards of education hence that of the university (Staats, Hupp, & Hagley, 2008, p.360).

Students who commit academic dishonesty do not think on their own hence they do not develop the art of thinking which is critical for quality education. Ensuring enough spacing between students in the exam rooms and adhering to silence during exams reduces the rate of cheating in institutions. Instructors should also participate fully in ensuring that the work presented by students meets the set standards in respective academic institutions.

Instructors should be able to call the students and ask them questions regarding their submitted work to ensure that they wrote the work themselves. Technological developments also assist in fighting these vices in institutions. Software development in the computer science field has developed software able to detect plagiarism. This software, known as anti-plagiarism software, runs scans through the internet by comparing the submitted articles with various databases in the internet.

The sentences are compared and any of them found matching in a particular percentage is classified as plagiarism. Academic institutions use this software to ensure that students do not copy directly and they appropriately acknowledge their sources (Celik, 2009, p.275). In some institutions, violation of anti-plagiarism or academic honesty rules in general amount to punishment of different forms that in worst-case result to expulsion from these academic institutions.

The forms of academic dishonesty and methods of prevention discussed above are only general descriptions. However, they can be discussed further into way that is more specific and forms that would help improve the standards of education in academic institutions through policy research by the concerned institutions. Academic honesty is crucial to the growth of a country’s economy because integrity defines the character of future graduates.

Bouchard, K. (2010). Discipline in Schools: Technology tests academic honesty. McClatchy – Tribune Business News . Web.

Celik, C. (2009). Perceptions of University Students on Academic Honesty as Related to Gender, University Type, and Major in Turkey. Journal of American Academy of Business , 14(2), 271-278.

Staats, S., Hupp, J., & Hagley, A. (2008). Honesty and Heroes: A Positive Psychology View of Heroism and Academic Honesty. The Journal of Psychology , 42(4), 357-72.

Vegh, G. S. (2009). Academic honesty for a new generation. McClatchy – Tribune Business News. Web.

“What is Academic Dishonesty” (1996). In Teaching Resources Guide 1996-1997 (pp. 77-78). Irvine, CA: Instructional Resources Center, University of California.

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• The Importance of Academic Honesty
• Plagiarism Effects and Strategies
• Maintaining Academic Honesty
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IvyPanda. (2018, October 10). Academic Honesty Essay. https://ivypanda.com/essays/academic-honesty/

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Educational resources and simple solutions for your research journey

Academic Dishonesty: Reasons, Implications and How to Avoid it 

Any method of employing dubious means like plagiarism, cheating, or manipulating data in any academic endeavour is termed academic dishonesty. Completely unacceptable, academic dishonesty is considered unethical as it poses a profound threat to the very foundation of scholarly inquiry. Students, researchers and even senior researchers and professors should always be aware that indulging in any activity that compromises academic honesty and fair practices can lead to grave consequences. It can also jeopardize their academic or professional careers.  

Table of Contents

Different types of research misconduct

Academic dishonesty can manifest in various forms in the context of science and research, all of which undermine the principles of honesty, transparency, and credibility upon which the scientific community relies. The most serious types of research misconduct are plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification. These need to be avoided at all costs as they severely affect the integrity of the whole research process. The reputation of the researcher will also be highly compromised, and this will negatively affect their academic and professional growth. 

Plagiarism:  Plagiarism is the use of another person’s work without providing due credit. It can involve using someone else’s ideas, concepts, processes, and results, copying whole or parts of work, paraphrasing sections, and using different sources to pass it on as one’s work without proper citation. Using one’s own previous published work without citing yourself also constitutes plagiarism.  

Fabrication:  Creating research data and results without actually conducting relevant research and reporting these as original and actual amounts to fabrication. Making claims about findings based on incomplete data sets also falls under this category. This type of misconduct not only compromises the accuracy of scientific knowledge but also erodes the trust placed in the research community. 

Falsification:   The act of omitting research data or results or manipulating research instruments, processes and materials refers to falsification. For example, to support a particular claim, if the researcher manipulates the process or changes data to suit the claim, it amounts to falsification. Manipulation of images involving distorting, introducing, or removing features is also a case of falsification. Such practices compromise the reliability and validity of scientific findings.  

Unethical authorship practices:  Many such practices are standard, such as gift authorship, guest authorship and ghost authorship. Gift or honorary authorship occurs when a person who has not contributed substantially to the intellectual content of the study is also credited as an author. This happens when a head of the department, a senior investigator, or a senior academic is given credit as an author, even when they have performed only a supervisory role. Guest authorship occurs when a known academic or an influential person in the field lends their name to the study despite little or no intellectual contribution to the study to give credibility to the study. Ghost authorship occurs when a person who substantially contributed to the work has not been credited as an author.  

Failure to disclose conflict of interest: Authors and researchers need to disclose conflicts of interest that may arise regarding financial gains, personal relationships, or based on any strong ideology or belief. Failure to disclose such conflicts amounts to general academic dishonesty. Even if there is no conflict of interest, it is essential to give a declaration amounting to the same. Not doing so undermines the transparency and accountability associated with authorship in scientific publications.  

Misappropriation of funds:  The misappropriation of funds, equipment or property is also classified under general misconduct. Academic institutions, funding agencies, and professional associations take such misconduct seriously, leading to damaged reputations, job loss, or the revocation of research grants. 

Tips to maintain research integrity  

It is crucial to follow some general practices, as outlined below, to avoid academic dishonesty and maintain research integrity. 

• While determining authorship, ensure inclusion of only those persons as authors who have substantially contributed to the conceptualization, design, conduct, interpretation and writing of the research study. Other persons should be acknowledged for their respective contributions in the acknowledgement section. Guest, gift, or ghost authorship should not be used.  
• To avoid plagiarism, students and early career researchers need to understand what constitutes plagiarism. In order to avoid falling into this practice even unintentionally, try to gain familiarity with the different citation styles followed by your specific discipline or institution. Institutional guidelines will be helpful in this regard, as well as discussing with your mentors and supervisors.  
• Maintaining research records according to respective institutional practices, including that of data in the course of the research process, is essential. In addition, making available the data sets along with coding when the research study results are made public is also critical in ensuring the integrity of the research. 
• Discuss any potential conflict of interest with your supervisors or with the journal editors before sending your paper for publication. 

Academic dishonesty is a serious offence that can result in severe consequences and damage the integrity of the research community. By upholding research integrity, we can ensure that research outcomes are trustworthy and credible, and contribute to the advancement of knowledge and society.

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What is Academic Dishonesty?

As we all know, some forms of academic dishonesty are blatant. When a student purchases an essay from a website and hands it in as her/his own work, it is a violation of academic integrity. When a student uses crib notes or a cell phone to cheat on an exam, it is a violation of academic integrity. Obviously, many more blatant forms of academic dishonesty exist.

However, there are also actions that are less blatant but that may be considered academic integrity violations. The first has to do with collaboration with other students; the second involves issues of plagiarism, especially when using the web. The information below should help clarify some of these issues for you so you do not commit academic integrity violations.

COLLABORATION WITH OTHER STUDENTS

Many classes at Berks include collaboration (working with others). In fact, research suggests that students learn a lot when working with their peers.

However, there are different kinds of collaborative assignments, and you must be aware of the specific guidelines for your assignment.

There will be times when your instructor will want you to work collaboratively for an entire assignment and hand in a group project; there will be times when your instructor will want you to work independently; and there will be times when your instructor will want you to work with peers during initial stages of the assigned project but then work independently of the final product.

Below are some examples of academic dishonesty related to collaboration written by faculty at our college.

Students are instructed to prepare assignments that reflect their own understanding of the material. Two or more students work on the assignments together, but instead of each typing or recording their own understanding/version of the assignment, they print multiple copies of the same work and submit it as their own.

On a case study that was a semester-long project, two students created one case and used the 'find and replace' function in Word to make it appear as if two unique cases were created.

Four students in a class have computer projects due for the class. The instructor has given permission for students to help each other but each student must turn in his or her own work. One student does not know how to do the assignment and asks another student for help. But, instead of only helping, the second student does the assignment for the first student, who turns it in as his own work.

Two other classmates decide to work together. Instead of each person doing his or her own work, they create one project, and each student submits it as his or her own work.

With permission from the English Department at University Park , we are reproducing below their useful document titled Types of Plagiarism , with slight modifications, so that students and faculty across the university will have similar understandings of what does and does not constitute plagiarism.

Plagiarism is the act of passing off someone else's work as your own.

Sometimes plagiarism is simple dishonesty. People who buy, borrow, or steal a paper to turn in as their own work know they are plagiarizing. Those who copy word-for-word--or who change a word here and there while copying--without enclosing the copied passage in quotation marks and identifying the author should know that they are plagiarizing.

But plagiarism can be more complicated in act and intent.

Paraphrasing, which is stating someone else's ideas, can be a useful way to support your own ideas, but it can lead you unintentionally to plagiarize. Jotting down notes and ideas from sources--and then thoughtlessly using them without properly introducing them with attributions to the authors or titles of those sources in introductory phrases--may result in a paper that is only a mosaic of your words and those of others that appear, nonetheless, to be yours.

Another innocent way to plagiarize is to allow your fellow students and friends to give you too much rhetorical help or do too much editing and proofreading of your work. If you think you have received substantial help in any way from people whose names will not appear as authors of the paper, acknowledge that help in a short sentence at the end of the paper or in your list of works cited. If you are not sure how much help is too much, talk with your instructor, so the two of you together can decide what kind of outside help (and how much) is proper, and how to give credit where credit is due.

As they are drafting their work, conscientious writers keep careful track of when they use ideas and or words from sources. They diligently try to distinguish between their own ideas, those of others, and common knowledge. They try to identify which part of their work comes from an identifiable source and then document their use of that source in accordance with established academic or professional conventions, such as a parenthetical citation and a works cited list. If you are in doubt about what needs documenting, talk with your instructor.

When thinking about plagiarism, it is hard to avoid talking about ideas as if they were objects like tables and chairs. Of course they are not. You should not feel that you are under pressure to invent new ideas every time you write. So-called original writing consists of thinking through ideas and expressing them in your own way. The result may not be new, but if honestly done, it may well be interesting and worthwhile reading. Print or electronic sources, as well as other people, may add good ideas to your own thoughts. When they do so in identifiable and specific ways, give them the credit they deserve.

These examples should clarify the difference between dishonest and proper uses of sources.

It is not generally recognized that at the same time when women are making their way into every corner of our work world, only one percent of the professional engineers in the nation are female. A generation ago this statistic would have raised no eyebrows, but today it is hard to believe. The engineering schools, reacting to social and governmental pressures, have opened wide their gates and are recruiting women with zeal. The major corporations, reacting to even more intense pressures, are offering attractive employment opportunities to practically all women engineering graduates.

From Samuel C. Florman, "Engineering and the Female Mind" Copyright by Harper's Magazine

Word-For-Word Plagiarizing

In the following example, the writer devises part of the first sentence in hopes the reader won't notice that the rest of the paragraph is simply copied from the source. The plagiarized words are italicized.

Because women seem to be taking jobs of all kinds, few people realize that only 1 percent of the professional engineers in the nation are female. A generation ago this statistic would have raised no eyebrows, but today it is hard to believe. The engineering schools, reacting to social and governmental pressures, have opened wide their gates and are recruiting women with zeal. The major corporations, reacting to even more intense pressures, are offering attractive employment opportunities to practically all women engineering graduates.

Quotation marks around all the copied text, followed by a parenthetical citation, would avoid plagiarism. But even if that were done, a reader might well wonder why so much was quoted from Florman. Beyond that, a reader will wonder why the writer chose to quote instead of paraphrase this passage, which as a whole is not very quotable. Furthermore, a paper consisting largely of quoted passages would be relatively worthless.

Plagiarizing By Paraphrase

In this case the writer follows the progression of ideas in the source very closely-too closely-by substituting his or her own words and sentences for those of the original.

It is not typically recognized that simultaneous with when women are entering every aspect of our work world, only one percent of the professional engineers in the nation are women . A generation ago this statistic would not have been surprising , but in today?s society it is difficult to believe . Engineering colleges and universities, responding to social and governmental pressures, are recruiting females with vigor . The major businesses, responding to extreme pressures, are providing appealing job opportunities to practically all female engineering graduates.

The writer appears to be generating his or her own ideas. In fact, they are Florman's ideas presented in the writer's words without acknowledgment. The writer could avoid plagiarism here by introducing the paraphrase with an attribution to Florman and following them with a parenthetical citation. Such an introduction is underlined here:

Samuel Florman points out that few people realize--(page     number).

Properly used, paraphrase is a valuable technique. You should use it to simplify or summarize so that the ideas or information, properly attributed in the introduction and documented in a parenthetical citation, may be woven into the pattern of your own ideas. You should not use paraphrase simply to avoid quotation; you should use it to express another's ideas in your own words when those ideas are not worth quoting verbatim.

Mosaic Plagiarism

This is a more sophisticated kind of plagiarism. The writer lifts phrases and terms from the source and embeds them into his or her own prose. Words and phrases that the writer lifts verbatim or with slight changes are italicized:

The pressure is on to get more women into engineering. The engineering schools and major corporations have opened wide their gates and are recruiting women zealously. Practically all women engineering graduates can find attractive jobs . Nevertheless, at the moment, only 1 percent of the professional engineers in the country are female .

Mosaic plagiarism may be caused by sloppy note taking, but it always looks thoroughly dishonest and will be judged as such. In the example above, just adding an introduction and a parenthetical citation will not eliminate the plagiarism since quotation marks are not used where required. But adding them would raise the question of why the writer thinks those short phrases and basic statements of fact and opinion are worth quoting. so the best solution is to paraphrase everything: recast the plagiarized parts in your own words, introduce the passage properly, and add a parenthetical citation.

When to Quote and Paraphrase, and When Not To

Using quotation marks around original wording avoids the charge of plagiarism, but when overdone, makes for a patchwork paper. When most of what you want to say comes from a source, either quote directly or paraphrase. In both cases, introduce your borrowed words or ideas by attributing them to the author and follow them with a parenthetical citation.

The secret to using sources productively is to make them work to support and amplify your ideas. If you find, as you work at paraphrasing, quoting, and citing, that you are only pasting sources together with a few of your own words and ideas--that too much of your paper comes from your sources and not enough from your own mind--then go back to the drawing board.

Try redrafting the paper without looking at your sources, using your own ideas. Only after completing a draft should you add the specific words and ideas from your sources to support what you want to say.

If you have doubts about the way you are using sources, talk to your instructor as soon as you can.

USING THE WORLD WIDE WEB

The World Wide Web can make plagiarism even more confusing for students. We all use the Web when we want immediate answers to something. If we want to identify a type of bird in our backyard, we look it up on the web. If we want to know the name of the twenty-first Vice-President of the U.S., we look it up on the Web.

But when you are writing a paper for a course, you need to treat the web as you would print sources. That is, you must cite your sources, quote and paraphrase correctly and appropriately, and ensure that you don?t pass off someone else?s ideas or words as your own.

If you have doubts about the way you are using the web, talk to your instructor as soon as you can.

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Causes of Academic Dishonesty

Literature on academic dishonesty cites a number of factors that contribute to dishonest academic practices (Whitley & Keith-Spiegel, 2002). Contributing factors include:

Peer pressure

Performance anxiety, excuse making.

• Inability to manage the demands of student life

Situations that encourage academic dishonesty

Self-justification habits, unfamiliarity with what constitutes academic dishonesty.

• Lack of understanding about consequences

Check Your Understanding

What is one common cause for academic dishonesty?

Reveal Answer

A lack of familiarity with what constitutes academic dishonesty is one common cause.

Students can pressure other students to commit acts of academic dishonesty in many ways: pressuring others to work together or split assignments when course policies prohibit collaboration, seeing other students cheat and then joining them, engaging in academic dishonesty as a group and helping friends on assignments or exams when the professor has prohibited collaboration.

Anxiety about academic performance can cause some students to cheat in academic activities. Students may cheat to avoid failing a course or receiving a bad grade. Some students may use cheating as a way to cope with poor test-taking skills.

Some students blame their professors for their cheating, complaining that the professors expect too much or are too difficult to understand. Students also may use the excuse that the exams were unfair or a course was not in their major. Occasionally, students reason that other students are cheating, so they have no alternative but to cheat as well.

Inability to manage demands of student life

One of the most common reasons for academic dishonesty is students' inability to manage the pressures of their social and academic lives. Students who cannot plan and manage their workload and other activities and are usually behind in meeting their deadlines and can at times resort to cheating or plagiarism as an easy solution.

When course policies do not spell out clearly what students can and cannot do, or when an instructor is not careful in enforcing academic integrity standards, some students may use the situation to commit acts of academic dishonesty. If the penalties for violating academic integrity standards are minimal, some students may consider cheating to be worth the risk of being caught.

Some students engage in self-talk in order to justify their actions to themselves, even though those actions may not be appropriate. For example, they justify cheating by telling themselves that they were cheating:

• Only in one academic activity
• Because they were sick and couldn't catch up
• "This particular assignment is not very important"
• "I do not need this particular course for graduation, so it's okay"
• "No one will get hurt by this"
• "I had to help a friend in need"
• "The instructor doesn't really care"
• "Everyone cheats in this class"

When a course policy is not clear, what can I do to ensure my academic integrity?

Request from the instructor clarification on that course policy.

Some students genuinely may not know what constitutes cheating or plagiarism and may not ask the course instructor for clarification. Some instructors may assume students understand the guidelines already. As a result, students can unintentionally commit acts of academic dishonesty. Further, uncertainty about technological issues and, particularly, international students' unfamiliarity with American standards of academic integrity, can also lead to problems involving questions of academic integrity.

It is also important to mention that many students resist committing acts of academic dishonesty for a variety of reasons. These reasons include the recognition of the fact that it is wrong, desire to earn their grades, genuine interest in learning, concern about how they would feel in the long run if they cheat, fear of getting caught and the associated embarrassment and penalties, respect for course instructor and classmates, ability to manage their workload well, and religious beliefs.

Academic dishonesty can not be justified under any circumstances. A damaged academic reputation may take many years of ethical behavior to repair.

Take Quiz 2

• Definition and Types
• Consequences
• Cheating, Falsification, Fabrication and Sabotage
• Protecting Yourself

What is academic misconduct? Cheating, plagiarizing, and other shortcut solutions

The importance of terminology

How students from diverse backgrounds bring different perspectives on plagiarism to the classroom

Academic integrity is key to an accurate assessment of student knowledge. Promoting integrity begins with building awareness of forms of academic misconduct.

The consequences of not addressing misinformation and missing the opportunity to teach critical thinking are many. And it’s important to address the difference between fact and opinion early on. Here, guest blogger Lisa Macdonald discusses a lesson plan that helps students discern fact from opinion.

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Aligning our understanding of definitions of academic integrity is important to promoting lifelong learning throughout the world in a post-industrial marketplace of ideas. Schools used to prepare students for jobs in an industrial world, ensuring that they understood procedures and hierarchy. But these days, the goals are different: academic institutions want graduates to display higher-order thinking, and employers want to hire people who can communicate original, innovative ideas. It may feel like a leap to link academic integrity terminology to learning outcomes and global equity, but in this post, we examine the connection between terminology and equity.

To start, academic integrity is important to teaching and learning . It ensures that feedback loops between students and teachers are based on accurate data. It promotes respect for learning. And it supports a life of honest workplace behavior.

Synchronizing terminology (such as the ENAI's Glossary for Academic Integrity 's work) and understanding the pedagogical context for evolving vocabulary are also components in supporting positive outcomes.

“Academic integrity,” a term popularized by researcher Dr. Donald McCabe in the early 1990s, describes work that displays honesty, trust, fairness, respect, responsibility, and courage per the ICAI . However, these values are dependent on cultural context –and the fact that academic integrity has been defined by the West must be acknowledged. In cultures that focus on rote memorization as a learning methodology, mimicry (repeating what is learned, often without attribution) may be a form of respect.

The nuances of cultural context play into terminology. For instance, while in the West “academic integrity” is an oft-used term, it isn’t as common in many regions where mimicry and respect go hand-in-hand, thus clouding the definition of plagiarism. According to research, for example, “the Latvian academic terminology database AkadTerm does not include terms such as academic integrity,’ ‘academic honesty,’ and ‘academic misconduct’” ( Tauginiené, et al. 2019 ).

As recently as 2016, Wheeler states, “Although ‘morality’ has long been taught in the Japanese educational system, academic integrity is a concept that has only recently received much attention and one that is not altogether well understood” ( Wheeler, 2016 ).

Professor Tosh Yamamoto’s 2021 Turnitin interview verifies that finding when he states, “Academic integrity is, I believe, a philosophical mindset to reflect the learning mind to the mirror of honesty, sincerity, contribution to the future society, and also scientific attitude and ethics and morals. However, on the other hand, education in Japan is focused on rote memorization and regurgitation and understanding” ( Yamamoto, 2021 ).

At the same time, contextual knowledge also drives the content of academic integrity. As research into academic integrity and pedagogy expands, so does terminology to match evolving mindsets and approaches. One pedagogical trend is an attempt to be more holistic about why and how these behaviors occur and to stop “blaming students” for these outcomes. Thus, “cheating,” while widely used as a synonym for academic misconduct, is going out of vogue as pedagogy pivots away from a “blaming” and “policing” culture towards more neutral terminology. When someone breaches academic integrity, it is called academic misconduct or academic dishonesty, which Allemand describes as “any sort of unfair advantage” ( 2012 ). These words have supplanted older terms like “cheating.”

One of the largest shifts in pedagogy has been a pivot towards collaboration between teachers and students. Helping students feel seen and supported is the opposite of an adversarial, hierarchical, blaming culture. Helping students feel seen and supported also increases learning outcomes.

The word cheating, for instance, falls into the “Us versus Them”-themed terminology. As Zachek describes in their research, “One student in Helgeson’s (2002) study incorporates this concept into their response about how faculty handle cheating, stating, ‘It’s kind of like ‘students vs. teachers’ and we help each other out’” ( Zachek 2020, p. 110 ).

Shortcut solutions is also a term that leaves room for understanding pressured, struggling students. Cheating, for instance, is a “shortcut solution,” which is a milder term to define when students shortchange learning, whether via contract cheating, plagiarism, or getting the answers to a test before the assessment date. In the realm of research, it includes ghostwriting, removing authors, and self-citation with the intent of boosting one’s own impact factor.

Understanding why and how students cheat has become a part of the discussion around academic integrity. Terminology has, as a result, become more neutral, and reflects the way educators have approached misconduct. The current understanding is that sometimes, people don’t set out to cheat, plagiarize, or otherwise misrepresent their work. And that ultimately, plagiarism can become a teachable moment .

Academic integrity is linked to education integrity. The following are some examples of academic integrity’s importance:

• We need accurate measurements of student learning (i.e., to ensure the student’s answers are their own), not only to foster their next steps but also to inform curriculum
• Research is a cumulative, interactive process—we must ensure that research is honest to promote innovation and void of fraud.
• Respect for the learning process is critical for life-long learning.

In a day and age when education leads to opportunity, and where students, post-education, have goals of entering a marketplace of ideas , original thinking is critical to success for both students and institutions. Academic integrity is an indicator of future workplace success and honesty–and thus a proven starting point for a life-long journey of learning. It is necessary to ensure that academic integrity terminology follows current pedagogy and that it not be entirely punitive, because learning must happen at all points of learning, even at instances of misconduct.

What is the consequence of not having aligned definitions of academic integrity terminology? Global inequity.

When definitions aren’t aligned, international students, or those students who come from cultures that operate under different definitions, suffer.

According to Zachek’s research, “In looking at the demographics of who cheats, one of Beasley’s (2016) primary concerns is if students of minoritized racial backgrounds are more likely to be reported due to institutionalized racism. To this end, Beasley (2009) reports that, ‘International undergraduates were much more likely to get reported for academic dishonesty than were domestic students’” ( Zachek 2020, p. 113 ).

Specific studies focusing on Japan indicate that these differing definitions and cultural contexts impact attitudes and instances of misconduct. “Terminology is always cultural [sic] specific, and it often [sic] impossible for words to be perfectly translated across languages. Furthermore, it may be the case that some cross-cultural studies have inconsistent results if they neglect to take into consideration the varying lifestyles, societies, and cultures of the participants when making comparisons. Therefore, it is likely more valuable to conduct surveys of attitudes within one cultural setting” ( Teeter, 2014, p. 104 ).

East Asia is no exception; studies focused on Turkey also reflect cultural differences. “Returning to the subject of cultural differences, academic integrity may be associated with community values. To demonstrate this, we provide an example from Turkey, where it is a not [sic] an uncommon practice in recent times to deal with ‘academic integrity’ under the umbrella term ‘values education’, especially in the case of providing awareness of ethical issues (e.g. Cihan 2014 )” ( Tauginiené, et al., 2019 ).

Thus, academic integrity terminology is critical to academic success. And ensuring inclusive terminology is critical to creating equal opportunities for academic success and upholding the reputation of institutions everywhere.

According to an article in the Journal of Academic Ethics, “A consistent understanding and the use of agreed terms allows the prospect of a shared set of values. It also allows a possibility of developing internationally acceptable common solutions relating to teaching methods, content and preventative strategies for academic misconduct. Reaching agreement on these fundamental concepts would in turn lead to alliances between various fields of science. However, to achieve this, variations in the conceptualization and use of key terms need to be discussed and agreed” ( Tauginiené, et al. 2019 ).

Taking into consideration cultural norms and differences, and ensuring that terminology is widely agreed upon would promote a shared understanding and positive learning outcomes so that international students and researchers alike readily and more easily adhere to global standards. “Academic integrity” is a starting point for lifelong learning, so it’s essential to understand exactly what it means and looks like, and to leave little room for interpretation.

Likewise, terminology for “academic misconduct” can also decriminalize language. This shift is important in ensuring that academic misconduct is not merely punitive but an opportunity for further learning and corrective action.

Doing so advances humanity. Original ideas and respect for attributing ideas is critical to the global, post-industrial world in which we live today; when we share ideas, we need to do so with the assurance that credit is given where necessary. Together, as a community, we can move forward together with comfort and confidence in academic integrity.

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Everyday Examples of Academic Dishonesty

Clone - copying material verbatim.

Josiah has been very busy for the past week and pushed off a ten-page paper due at midnight. He texts his friend who took the class last semester for his old paper. Josiah promptly changes his name at the top and submits it for grading, passing it off as his own.

Copying portions of another person’s work.

Maria stumbled upon a research paper that had a chart relating to her project. Being crunched for time, she copied and pasted it into her document, but did not provide an in-text or full citation.

Find and replace – replacing words to try to bypass plagiarism detectors.

Molly didn’t feel like writing her research paper but found an essay online that fit the prompt. She used the “find and replace” feature to substitute synonyms for words to try and prevent SafeAssign from detecting plagiarism.

Remix – paraphrasing material, in your own words, from multiple sources.

Tyler is stuck on a sociology paper and decides to Google a summary of what he plans to write. He browses Wikipedia, a research paper he found on Google, and an article pertaining to the topic and decides to rewrite bits and pieces from each source to use in his paper.

Mashup – copy and pasting material from multiple sources.

Steven must write an essay on the history of the Cold War. He finds six different books while researching and concludes that they have summed up the material he needs for the essay. He meticulously takes bits and pieces from each book transitioning between each piece with his own words falsely illustrating individual work.

Citing sources incorrectly or fabricating sources.

Grant is writing a paper for his economics class and is struggling to find enough sources to meet the requirements of the assignment. He concludes that the only way to get the paper done and meet the requirements is to use the information he got from a different source and just create a new, false citation for the information to help him reach the citation requirements for the paper.

Citing an excess of sources to meet a word or page count.

Jacob is overdue on an essay in his Dance Theory class. He has a rough outline of the work he needs to do and how to organize his essay. To save time and meet his word count, he decides to include a full sentence(s) quote/citation approximately every three sentences. His works cited page is present, accurate, and comprehensive for all his sources. But in doing this, the essay is more than doubled in length.

Mirroring the structure/organization of another essay.

Elaina has an essay that is due tomorrow. She has done her own research and has her own information, but she does not know how to organize the essay correctly. She finds a paper on the same subject online and copies the exact order of the main points for her own paper. She submits the essay without citing the paper whose organization she copied.

Using past work that is your own (you need professor discretion to do so).

Mark is writing an essay about a topic he had previously studied in a different class. He decides he has a lot of other work to do and his last paper was fully original and well-written. He decides he wants to use the paper he previously wrote for this new assignment. Mark should first reach out to the professor and look through the syllabus for the policy rules on this issue. If the professor allows Mark to use the old paper, he should still make sure to develop the paper further, ensure it is all original work, and meets all the guidelines for the new assignment.

NOTE: You need to check with your professor for their specific policies regarding using past work.

Paying online services or someone else to complete an assignment for you.

Stephen is stressing out about a paper for his Ag Business class that is due in two days. Stephen is behind on the material and doesn’t think he has enough time to finish the paper and do his other homework. He decides the best option to get the paper done and get a good grade is to pay a friend who took the class last semester to write his paper for him. The friend agrees and writes the paper for Stephen that he then submits for a grade.

Syntax Similarities:

Jacob is stuck on step 16 of a coding assignment due the next day. He has his friend Steven over at his dorm helping him and Steven simply does that step for him. While Steven can’t remember exactly what he did to get past it, what he does do for Jacob’s assignment is so similar in syntax that the auto grader flags Jacobs assignment for academic dishonesty.

Group Work & Collaboration

Excessive Continuity on Assignments

Sarah must submit an essay on the literary work: War and Peace. She decides to work on portions of the assignment with three other friends. A Google Doc among them is formed for brainstorming ideas. After a while, all the group members simply copy and paste content from the shared Google Docs into each of their individual essays. Despite Sarah having a hand in the conceptualization of this content, it is flagged for academic dishonesty.

Traditional Exams

Phones are prohibited on any exams. If your phone goes off during an exam, then you will most likely be given a 0%. Many professors will make you put your backpack at the front of the room before an exam, and we recommend that you stow away your phone in your bag to ensure it won’t be a distraction.

Open Book Exams

If your professor classifies that an exam is “Open Book”, the only resource you are permitted to use is the book. If you try to use your notes, you risk being reported to the professor. Use your notes only on “Open Note” exams and where otherwise stated.

Storing Notes in a Calculator

With the calculators that are often allowed in many classes that have graphing capability, it is also very easy to store information as notes in a section of the calculator and be able to quickly and discreetly access them during the exam. Jorge decided that this was a viable alternative to studying the night before his statistics final, and as he begins to take the exam, he runs across a question that he needs to know how to apply a specific formula. Naturally since he saved his notes to his fancy calculator, he opens it up and begins to work. This is considered academically dishonest behavior.

Unpermitted Calculators

Math 162, Calculus 2, is historically a very difficult class at Purdue. Most professors require students to only use a simple four function calculator on exams and homework assignments because more advanced calculators can do the more complex work for the students. Diana is really struggling on Calculus 2 and decides to take a graphing calculator into her second exam. She programs in equations and uses the advanced features to finish her exam and gets a very good grade, but when her professor reviews the exam, they notice that Diana was able to somehow skip steps as if she was using short cuts that haven’t been taught yet in class. Diana is called into the professor’s office and she is asked if she got an advanced tutor or how she was able to do the steps. She admits that she took in her graphing calculator and she ends up receiving an F for the entire class.

Taking an Exam for Someone Else

Alex was very unprepared for his upcoming stats exam. However, his friend, Stephen, passed the class last semester with an A+. Alex asks Stephen to take the exam for him, and Stephen agrees. When Stephen finishes Alex’s exam, he goes to turn it in to the professor, and is asked to show his ID. After the professor realizes what has happened, both Alex and Stephen are caught.

Non-Traditional Exams

Locked Down Browsers

When Claire takes her weekly quizzes for her online EAPS class, they require the use of the Lockdown Browser Software. She proceeds to run the software inside a virtual machine so she can still browse the Internet and other applications for the answers while she takes the quiz.

Open Book & Take-Home Exams

A professor makes a portion of each exam a take-home section for students to complete on their own time. He permits the use of notes, study materials, the Internet, and even collaboration on this take-home exam. Nathan works on some of the questions but is stuck on two main points. After texting his lab group, several students in the class get together to discuss the difficult problems.

Online Exams

Steven is taking an online exam that is not open book or open notes. He has quite a few friends in the class and they decide to take the exam together so they can talk about each question before submitting the exam. This is academically dishonest collaboration on an exam and has happened at Purdue. All students submitted the exam at the same time and received the same grade, so the professor was able to notice the collaboration. It turned out that over one third of the class took the exam this way and all these students were disciplined for their actions.  

Online Resources

Using Chegg dishonestly is very easy to do which is why it is important to understand proper and improper uses of this platform. Looking up answers to homework assignments or accessing the answers to assignments in teacher versions of textbooks is not an appropriate use of the site. While Chegg can be helpful to access textbooks and more practice problems, using this resource to find assignment answers is considered academic dishonesty because it is a form of copying and plagiarism.

Intellectual Property

Joe is working on a philosophy paper and is confused about how to answer the writing prompt for the assignment. He decides that he will just use the audio recording from his professor’s lecture to help him answer the prompt. He can’t come up with any of his own original thought for the paper, so he simply combines a bunch of the professor’s.

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• Knowledge Base

Academic Integrity vs Academic Dishonesty

Published on 15 July 2022 by Tegan George and Jack Caulfield. Revised on 13 April 2023.

Academic integrity  is the value of being honest, ethical, and thorough in your academic work. It allows readers to trust that you aren’t misrepresenting your findings or taking credit for the work of others.

Academic dishonesty (or academic misconduct) refers to actions that undermine academic integrity. It typically refers to some form of plagiarism , ranging from serious offences like purchasing a pre-written essay to milder ones like accidental citation errors – most of which are easy to detect with a plagiarism checker .

These concepts are also essential in the world of professional academic research and publishing. In this context, accusations of misconduct can have serious legal and reputational consequences.

Table of contents

Types of academic dishonesty, why does academic integrity matter, examples of academic dishonesty, frequently asked questions about plagiarism.

While plagiarism is the main offence you’ll hear about, academic dishonesty comes in many forms that vary extensively in severity, from faking an illness to buying an essay.

Prevent plagiarism, run a free check.

Most students are clear that academic integrity is important, but dishonesty is still common.

There are various reasons you might be tempted to resort to academic dishonesty: pressure to achieve, time management struggles, or difficulty with a course. But academic dishonesty hurts you, your peers, and the learning process. It’s:

• Unfair to the plagiarised author
• Unfair to other students who did not cheat
• Damaging to your own learning
• Harmful if published research contains misleading information
• Dangerous if you don’t properly learn the fundamentals in some contexts (e.g., lab work)

The consequences depend on the severity of the offence and your institution’s policies. They can range from a warning for a first offence to a failing grade in a course to expulsion from your university.

• Faking illness to skip a class
• Asking for a classmate’s notes from a special review session held by your professor that you did not attend
• Crowdsourcing or collaborating with others on a homework assignment
• Citing a source you didn’t actually read in a paper
• Cheating on a test
• Peeking at your notes on a take-home exam that was supposed to be closed-book
• Resubmitting a paper that you had already submitted for a different course (self-plagiarism)
• Forging a doctor’s note to get an extension on an assignment
• Fabricating experimental results or data to prove your hypothesis in a lab environment
• Buying a pre-written essay online or answers to a test
• Falsifying a family emergency to get out of taking a final exam
• Taking a test for a friend

Academic integrity means being honest, ethical, and thorough in your academic work. To maintain academic integrity, you should avoid misleading your readers about any part of your research and refrain from offences like plagiarism and contract cheating, which are examples of academic misconduct.

Academic dishonesty refers to deceitful or misleading behavior in an academic setting. Academic dishonesty can occur intentionally or unintentionally, and it varies in severity.

It can encompass paying for a pre-written essay, cheating on an exam, or committing plagiarism . It can also include helping others cheat, copying a friend’s homework answers, or even pretending to be sick to miss an exam.

Academic dishonesty doesn’t just occur in a classroom setting, but also in research and other academic-adjacent fields.

Consequences of academic dishonesty depend on the severity of the offence and your institution’s policy. They can range from a warning for a first offence to a failing grade in a course to expulsion from your university.

For those in certain fields, such as nursing, engineering, or lab sciences, not learning fundamentals properly can directly impact the health and safety of others. For those working in academia or research, academic dishonesty impacts your professional reputation, leading others to doubt your future work.

Academic dishonesty can be intentional or unintentional, ranging from something as simple as claiming to have read something you didn’t to copying your neighbour’s answers on an exam.

You can commit academic dishonesty with the best of intentions, such as helping a friend cheat on a paper. Severe academic dishonesty can include buying a pre-written essay or the answers to a multiple-choice test, or falsifying a medical emergency to avoid taking a final exam.

The consequences of plagiarism vary depending on the type of plagiarism and the context in which it occurs. For example, submitting a whole paper by someone else will have the most severe consequences, while accidental citation errors are considered less serious.

If you’re a student, then you might fail the course, be suspended or expelled, or be obligated to attend a workshop on plagiarism. It depends on whether it’s your first offence or you’ve done it before.

As an academic or professional, plagiarising seriously damages your reputation. You might also lose your research funding or your job, and you could even face legal consequences for copyright infringement.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the ‘Cite this Scribbr article’ button to automatically add the citation to our free Reference Generator.

George, T. & Caulfield, J. (2023, April 13). Academic Integrity vs Academic Dishonesty. Scribbr. Retrieved 1 July 2024, from https://www.scribbr.co.uk/preventing-plagiarism/academic-integrity/

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U-M Guidance for Faculty/Instructors

Genai in-depth, getting started with genai: instructor guide.

The Getting Started with Generative Artificial Intelligence U-M Instructor Guide provides an overview and resources related to Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI or GAI).

Read more... about Getting Started with GenAI

Academic Technology​@Michigan

Visit the resources on the Academic Technology@Michigan website for a deeper dive on GenAI considerations for teaching and learning.

Read more... about Academic Technology@Michigan

Specific Implications for Writing and Other Disciplines

Though writing is just one of the many areas that will be transformed by GenAI, we consider the impact of GenAI on writing and approaches to writing as a template.

Read more... about Specific Implications for Writing and Other Disciplines

University of Michigan’s GenAI offerings

With the rise of numerous GenAI-based tools, it is important to know how to choose a tool that works best for you. Tools provided by the University of Michigan, such as U-M GPT are private, secure, and free for faculty. Data you share while using these tools will not be used for training these models, and hence are not at risk of being leaked. Look for the umich.edu domain in the page link to verify that you are using a U-M website.

Academic/Teaching Implications

Because large language models can write so quickly and competently, they can assist students in completing many common types of assessments. Text outputs from language models can be used to answer essay questions, write papers, and reply to discussion board posts, simulating recall and understanding with little effort or engagement. How quickly can ChatGPT answer an essay question? Faster than you’d think .

Language models generalize and summarize existing knowledge based on probability predictions of word sequences rather than copying it verbatim, and so it may be impossible to identify their use with certainty. While detection tools like Turnitin or GPTZero may report probability of AI authorship, they are easily circumvented and cannot provide definitive proof of cheating. False positives and negatives are possible, and even likely. U-M does not recommend the use of AI-detection technology at this time given their high error rate.

It can be anticipated that an overwhelming majority of U-M students will be using GenAI tools in Fall 2023. Given the rapid evolution of the technology and its adaptation, this page is focused on offering near-term recommendations. Our response to GenAI should be consistent with our core values of fairness, diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, research veracity, and ethical integrity.

GenAI will create new opportunities across the entire spectrum of research activities, ranging from the natural sciences, social science, economics and political sciences, humanities, engineering, biomedical and clinical sciences, as well as the creative arts. Visit the Resources for Research page for more information.

As instructors look to the next semester, we recommend the following tasks to prepare.

Note: these tasks are also discussed in the Getting Started with Generative Artificial Intelligence: U-M Instructor guide

Evaluate if you need to make changes to your course and assessment practices

AI augmentation refers to the utilization of artificial intelligence to assist, expedite, enhance, and in some cases, substitute for humans in accomplishing tasks. AI augmentation will significantly alter the education landscape, we will need to re-evaluate teaching strategies to take advantage of the opportunities and mitigate risks. Our response to GenAI should be consistent with our core values of fairness, diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, research veracity, and ethical integrity.

Further, the rapid integration of AI in various sectors of society requires a re-evaluation of curriculum design to prepare students for a future where AI will be ubiquitous. On a more immediate note, it can be anticipated that an overwhelming majority of U-M students will be using GenAI tools in Fall 2023. Given the rapid evolution of the technology and its adaptation, this section is focused on offering near-term recommendations.

Key components of courses will have to be reviewed in relation to GenAI capacities and risks. Instructors should at minimum be able to answer the following questions about each course:

• Should GenAI be used in the course or not—and why or why not?
• If GenAI is to be used, how is the use to be documented?
• Should course learning objectives be revised?
• Should GenAI competencies be taught in the specific disciplinary context?
• Should assessments be revised?

Read more about redesigning assessments

Read more about GenAI Implications for Writing and Other Disciplines

Explore a book guide on methods to incorporate ChatGPT into class assignments .

Find additional resources on GenAI considerations for teaching and learning on the Academic Technology@Michigan site.

Draft a syllabus statement

First familiarize yourself with any revised academic integrity policies from your school/college. Then draft a statement in your syllabus on acceptable uses of GenAI in your classroom.

Read more about course policies and example syllabi statements

Talk with Students about ChatGPT and Generative AI Early and Often

We encourage instructors to set aside time early in the term to tell students directly about course policies regarding GenAI usage, reasons for this decision, and what potential consequences may look like when policies are not followed. We also suggest instructors include language about ChatGPT and GenAI in the class orientation content of Canvas courses. Use the following pointers to hold a conversation with your students about the ethical and practical implications of GenAI for this course, the discipline, and beyond:

• Talk about and evaluate capabilities of GenAI as a group/class
• Motivate students to exceed outputs of GenAI
• Set expectations early, ideally on day one of class, and provide regular reminders
• Policies will vary between campuses, departments, and even individual classes. Each instructor must clearly articulate their own expectations and policies for GenAI use.
• When developing your policies, think about what you actually care about, what you actually want to assess, etc.
• Ethics guidance on GenAI for students
• Be explicit about GenAI policies within syllabus language (“In this course…”)
• Course Policies & Syllabi Statements
• Recommended Course Policies, Evals, Strategies to Promote Academic Honesty
• MLA Citing Generative AI
• APA How to Cite ChatGPT
• Introduction to Academic Integrity (U-M Library page)

Academic Misconduct Policies

Current definitions of academic misconduct do not take account of the new technologies and should be revised. The same is true of Honor Codes and the policies followed by the Academic Judiciary. The Library’s website offers a basic definition of plagiarism: “Plagiarism: presenting others' work without adequate acknowledgement of its source, as though it were one’s own.” LSA’s website details a range of misconduct, including cheating, plagiarism, falsification of documents, and unacceptable collaboration. The College of Engineering has an Honor Code that defines misconduct. These and other schools’ and colleges’ policies should be updated this summer to take into account the potential and risks of GenAI in instructional contexts.

Common approaches to updating academic misconduct policies are to consider ChatGPT (or GenAI) as prohibited help from another “person” (e.g., UCLA), or as a “source” that should be acknowledged (e.g., UW Madison). The “person” approach misleadingly attributes sentience and a reasoning capacity to GenAI. The “source” approach is more workable.

Treating GenAI as a source that should be acknowledged is more complicated than citing a print book or online article. Unauthorized GenAI use may constitute cheating (a student presenting ChatGPT output as their own original work) and/or plagiarism (copying output from a source without acknowledging that source). U-M schools and colleges will have to determine what misconduct policies will work in their contexts, in consultation with Academic Judiciary bodies.

Some American schools’ academic misconduct policies recommend that instructors use AI-detecting tools. This committee finds the detecting tools unreliable and capable of false positives, so we recommend against that approach.

The use of GenAI in coursework is banned at some universities. This approach is impossible to enforce perfectly, partly because detecting tools are (at present) untrustworthy, and partly because GenAI can be used undetectably at any stage in composing processes, such as prompting ChatGPT to generate ideas, an abstract, an outline, or an essay draft. If GenAI is to be banned in specific contexts, it is vital to ensure that the instruction protects equity and accessibility for students.

Five Books for People Who Really Love Books

These five titles focus on the many connections we can form with what we read.

My dad likes to fish, and he likes to read books about fishing. My mom is a birder; she reads about birds. There are plenty of books on both subjects, I’ve found, when browsing in a gift-giving mood. These presents don’t just prove I’m familiar with their interests. They’re a way to acknowledge that we read about our pastimes to affirm our identity: Fly-fishers are contemplative sorts who reflect on reflections; birders must cultivate stillness and attention. What we choose to read can be a way of saying: I am this kind of soul.

For my part, I like reading more than I like almost anything else. And so, in the manner of my parents, I like to read books about books . Writers who write about writing, readers who write about reading—these are people I instantly recognize as my kind. We’re people who are always in the middle of a chapter, who start conversations by asking, “What are you reading right now?” For us, a meta-book is like coffee brewed with more coffee. It’s extra-strength literature.

If you really love books, or you want to love them more, I have five recommendations. None of these are traditional literary criticism; they’re not dry or academic. They take all kinds of forms (essay, novel, memoir) and focus on the many connections we can form with what we read. Those relationships might be passionate, obsessive, even borderline inappropriate—and this is what makes the books so lovable. Finishing them will make you want to pick up an old favorite or add several more titles to your to-read list.

U and I , by Nicholson Baker

I can now say that I’ve been reading Baker for more than 20 years, or more than half my life. But I didn’t know that would happen when I found U and I in a college friend’s car, borrowed it, and never returned it. The subject, not the author, appealed to me then—I loved John Updike. And so did Baker, though love is probably not the right word. This book-length essay is not quite, or not merely, an appreciation of Updike; it’s a hilarious confessional “true story” of Baker’s anxieties, ambitions, competitive jealousy, and feelings of inadequacy in the face of Updike’s abundant body of work. It’s rich too, with wonderful observations on reading and writing in general, as in a passage considering how much more affecting a memoir becomes once the author is deceased: “The living are ‘just’ writing about their own lives; the dead are writing about their irretrievable lives , wow wow wow.”

A poem by John Updike: 'Half Moon, Small Cloud'

Dayswork , by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel

I almost prefer to keep certain books on my to-read list forever, where they remain full of magical possibility and cannot disappoint me. Moby-Dick is one of them. What if, God forbid, I chance to read it at the wrong time or in the wrong place and it doesn’t change my life? So I turn to Dayswork instead, which feels like cheating—you get some of the experience of reading Moby-Dick without any of the risk. This very novel novel, written collaboratively by a novelist and a poet who happen to be married, is sort of a sneaky biography of Herman Melville, framed by a meta-narrative about a woman writing a book during lockdown. This narrator delivers a parade of delightful facts and quotes and anecdotes, which she’s been collecting on sticky notes. You could think of it also as a biography of Melville’s most famous novel, which has had its own life after his death and touched so many other lives. Dayswork is fragmentary, digressive, and completely absorbing.

Read: The endless depths of Moby-Dick symbolism

Written Lives , by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa

Marías is one of my favorite novelists, but I only recently encountered this work, a collection of short, dubiously nonfictional biographies in a very specific style. In the prologue, Marías explains that he had edited an anthology of stories by writers so obscure, he was forced to compose their biographical notes using odd, scanty evidence that made it all sound “invented.” It occurred to him that he could do the same thing for authors much more famous (Henry James, Thomas Mann, Djuna Barnes), treating “well-known literary figures as if they were fictional characters, which may well be how all writers, whether famous or obscure, would secretly like to be treated,” he explains. The result is marvelously irreverent, packed with unforgettable details (Rilke, supposedly, loved the letter y and used any excuse to write it) and endearing patterns (Marías would have us believe that many writers loathe Dostoyevsky). Written Lives immediately earned a spot on my shelf of most treasured objects, and every friend I’ve recommended it to has been equally enchanted.

Read: An introverted writer’s lament

Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life , by Yiyun Li

This sad and incredibly beautiful memoir from a writer best known for her fiction takes its title from a line in a notebook by the New Zealand author Katherine Mansfield. For Li, correspondence, diaries and journals, and literature in general are forms of consolation and companionship that make life worth living even in times of overwhelming despair. The memoir is a record of the reading experiences that saved Li from a dangerous depression. It made me want to dig more deeply into the work of all her favorite writers—Thomas Hardy, Ivan Turgenev, Elizabeth Bowen, William Trevor—because she describes them so warmly and affectionately, as if they were friends. Here, as in her novels, Li is philosophical, with a gift for startling aphorisms: “Harder to endure than fresh pain is pain that has already been endured,” she writes. And “One always knows how best to sabotage one’s own life,” or “What does not make sense is what matters.” Li’s work is so moving and so very wise.

Madness, Rack, and Honey , by Mary Ruefle

The American poet Mary Ruefle is one of those writers people like to call a “national treasure,” which always has to do with something beyond brilliance or talent, an additional spectacular charm that makes you wish you knew them in “real life.” This collection of lectures on poetry and topics adjacent to poetry (sentimentality, theme, the moon) is the perfect introduction to Ruefle’s particular charisma. She’s unabashedly devoted to poets and poems, but you don’t have to love poetry to fall in love with her voice. She’s plainspoken yet mysterious, always asking curious questions, about death and fear and secrets, and then answering herself with surprising authority. Ruefle is inclined toward quirky asides, but all roads lead back to books: “I offer my dinner guest, after dinner, the choice between regular and decaf coffee, when in fact I don’t have any decaf in the house,” she writes. “I am so sincere in my effort to be a good host that I lie; I think this probably happens all the time in poetry.” Ruefle offers a beautiful example of how a life filled with reading opens and alters the mind.

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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Opinion Columnist

What Post-Debate Polls Reveal About Replacing Biden

It’s wise to be skeptical of the polls that have followed Thursday’s presidential debate. The people who watched the debate tend to be partisans whose minds were already made up. It takes longer for clips and impressions to filter out to voters who pay less attention to politics.

Still, a few things stand out from the early numbers . First is that no matter which snap poll you look at, the race looks stable. That’s not because voters think President Biden performed well or even because they think he’s fit for the job. Poll after poll shows they think he lost the debate, and badly, and he’s too old to serve a second term. But so far it’s not leading to a significant swing toward Donald Trump. For Biden voters, a candidate whose fitness seems uncertain is better than a candidate whose malignancy is known.

A new Data for Progress poll is particularly interesting. It, too, found that voters thought Trump had won the debate. It, too, found that most voters believe Biden is too old to serve another term as president. It found that voters were more concerned by Biden’s age and health than by Trump’s criminal cases and potential threat to democracy. And it found a mostly unchanged race; Trump led Biden by three points.

The poll went further, though. It tested other Democrats against Trump: Vice President Kamala Harris performed identically to Biden. Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Gavin Newsom, J.B. Pritzker, Josh Shapiro and Gretchen Whitmer all performed about the same, trailing Trump by two to three points. But the similar margins obscure how lesser-known Democrats would change the race: 7 percent of voters were undecided about a Biden-Trump or Harris-Trump race, but between 9 percent and 12 percent of voters were undecided in the other matchups. More voters are up for grabs.

Democrats could read these results in two ways. The line from the Biden camp has been that Biden’s bad night won’t lead anyone to vote for Trump. The other way to read these results is that the base support for the Democratic alternative to Trump is pretty sturdy. Perhaps Democrats should be less worried about the possible fractures of an open convention and more interested in its possibilities.

For Democrats, fear of Trump is a powerful motivator. It generates a unity and energy completely separate from the Democratic nominee. But it’s not enough. Biden trails in most polls, as do other Democrats. There’s a crucial group of 7 percent to 12 percent of voters who do not fear Trump enough to vote for the Democratic nominee simply by default. They need to be won over.

The question Democrats need to be asking themselves is: Which candidate stands the best chance of winning those voters over?

Thursday’s debate was the Biden campaign’s high-risk gamble to show he was up to the job. It proved he isn’t. Even so, Democrats have feared that their base is fragile enough that an unpredictable process to replace Biden might fracture their support. But what the polls seem to show is that anti-Trump voters will stick by a Democrat, and a larger share of voters are open to Democrats if the party picks a more compelling candidate.

The polls may change sharply in the coming days, and I’ve heard rumors of internal Democratic polls that show significantly worse post-debate numbers for Biden. It’ll take some time yet to know where the race will settle. And it’s not as if Trump is standing still: He’s near to finalizing his V.P. pick.

David French

The Supreme Court Helps Trump — and Future Presidents — Dodge Accountability

I’m still sorting through the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling , and while it’s way too early for a definitive interpretation (scholars will be arguing about it for years), it’s not too early for three broad conclusions.

First, and most important, the Supreme Court granted a dangerous amount of discretion to presidents. The court might say that presidents aren’t above the law, but in reality, it established an extraordinarily broad zone of absolute immunity for presidents (one broad enough, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor notes in a dissent, to potentially protect presidents from prosecution for bribes and assassinations) and a tough test for prosecuting those acts that aren’t immune.

In the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the president must be immune from prosecution for an official act unless the government can show that applying a criminal prohibition to that act would pose no “dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the executive branch.” This is a high bar to clear.

To understand the most dangerous potential implications of this action, consider that a president has the extraordinary authority to order troops into American streets under the Insurrection Act. Then, once deployed, those troops would be under the command of a person who would almost certainly enjoy absolute immunity for the orders he gives them.

Second, forget any thought that the special counsel Jack Smith can try Donald Trump before the election. The Supreme Court remanded the case to the lower courts for additional proceedings to determine whether Trump can be prosecuted for any of his official acts during the scheme to overturn the election. It’s hard to imagine any scenario where the remaining legal questions can be resolved before November.

Third, Trump is still in grave legal jeopardy — but only if he loses the election. Even if Trump is ultimately held to be immune for all his official acts, he still can be prosecuted for private acts. During oral arguments , Trump’s counsel admitted that several of the acts Trump is criminally charged with committing should be considered private and not in furtherance of his official duties.

Trump’s lawyer agreed it would have been a private act when Trump, as one justice characterized the special counsel’s allegations, “turned to a private attorney who was willing to spread knowingly false claims of election fraud to spearhead his challenges to the election results.” It would also have been a private act when Trump “conspired with another private attorney who caused the filing in court of a verification signed by Petitioner that contained false allegations to support a challenge.”

This means Smith still has a case against Trump — unless Trump wins the election. Then he could use his power over the Department of Justice to end the case against him, and potentially even pardon himself from both the Jan. 6 prosecution and the classified documents prosecution in Florida.

The bottom line is clear: Trump’s fate (and potentially even the rule of law) is entirely in the hands of the American people. They alone will decide if he can be held accountable.

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Frank Bruni

Contributing Opinion Writer

This Is Not Jill Biden’s Problem to Solve

Jill Biden should have prevented this. Jill Biden should prevent this.

I’ve been hearing or reading versions of that since President Biden’s alarming performance during Thursday night’s debate, as if it had been the first lady’s job to decide and tell him that he wasn’t up to running for a second term, as if it fell on her to persuade him to step aside. I briefly had the same thought myself.

But it’s a presumptuous, unfair and even meanspirited one. Jill Biden doesn’t hold an actual job whose description includes advising the president on the most sensitive matters and painful choices. She wasn’t elected to do that. She wasn’t elected, period. So how is it her obligation — and not the task of one of his many paid aides or one of the political operatives who have been counseling him for decades — to make everything right? She’s a spouse, not a sorcerer.

I understand the impulse to look to her and to Valerie Biden, his sister, who has also been mentioned frequently in recent days as a rescue worker and possible savior. The president is known to trust them in a special way. They’re family. And people who believe that Biden is unintentionally setting the country up for the disaster of another Trump administration are desperate for some — for any — intervention.

But it’s noteworthy and arguably sexist that the women in his life are supposed to clean house here. And the belief that Jill Biden does and can speak harsh truths to her husband violates the sturdy truism that nobody on the outside of a marriage has any real sense of the dynamics inside it. Maybe that’s not how she understands or plays her role. Maybe she offers him comfort and lends him support once he has chosen his course. That’s indeed something that she, as opposed to one of his political counselors, is in a unique position to do.

Focusing on Jill Biden lets Joe Biden off the hook. It falls on him to summon the self-awareness and the character to make the right decision. I’d love it if she assisted that with tough questions and brutally candid observations. But she’s not accountable for those.

Katherine Miller

Opinion Writer and Editor

A Crucial Week Ahead for Trump’s Case and Biden’s Future

Every Monday morning on The Point, we kick off the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:

President Biden and Donald Trump have very light schedules so far for the week, probably in part because of the July 4 holiday, and perhaps in part because of the real suspense in the debate’s aftermath.

There continues to be widespread friction and noise about what Democrats will do, though Biden is in until something changes, which it may not. On Sunday, our colleagues in the newsroom reported that the Biden family wants the president to remain in the race, and a variety of Democratic politicians came out in support of Biden over the weekend. There is also a lot of reporting about what went wrong with the debate and what other Democrats are thinking about the prospect of a Kamala Harris candidacy or an open convention. Initial polling in the aftermath of the debate didn’t show much movement in the close head-to-head result; there will most likely be a lot more polling as the week continues. A lot of information keeps coming out — that could mean things change in some way, or it could just mean there’s deep conflict.

This week, the Supreme Court is extremely likely to rule on the presidential immunity issue in the federal Jan. 6 case against Donald Trump, probably on Monday morning. The case is very unlikely to go to trial this year, regardless of how the court rules. But because of the novel questions raised by Trump’s lawyers and the importance of Jan. 6 itself, how the court rules could have enormous consequences for the presidency and the campaign.

Steve Bannon is going to prison Monday for a few months, after he refused to comply with a subpoena from the Jan. 6 select committee. David Brooks interviewed him ahead of his incarceration.

This isn’t, you know, American politics, but it is relevant to our presidential politics, particularly looking ahead toward the future of European alliances: The U.K. has an election on Thursday (Labour is expected to return to power). The French are now headed toward their July 7 runoff election, which Emmanuel Macron called and which may majorly diminish his power.

Bret Stephens

The ‘Bad Debate’ Nonsense

Wishful thinking, to adapt a phrase, is a helluva drug.

In the aftermath of Joe Biden’s debate with Donald Trump, his well-wishers are claiming that it was just an off night. “Bad debate nights happen,” wrote Barack Obama in a social media post that’s garnered more than 100 million views. Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder and a major Democratic donor, wrote that when Biden “does poorly, he tends to bounce back — and then win.” Biden himself told a gathering of East Hampton donors that “I didn’t have a great night, but neither did Trump.”

Pure nonsense.

It’s true that Obama had a bad first debate against Mitt Romney in 2012, just as Ronald Reagan had a bad first debate against Walter Mondale in 1984 — and both men went on to win resounding re-elections. It’s also true that Donald Trump’s performance — by turns bombastic, evasive, mendacious and meandering — would have been seen as embarrassing against nearly any other opponent.

But Biden was his opponent, and the transparent problem with the president’s performance wasn’t that he debated poorly. It’s that he is suffering from serious cognitive decline, something from which there is no coming back. I don’t say this as a medical expert, only as one of many millions of people who have witnessed, in elderly people we love, the same symptoms we saw in Biden on Thursday: the garbled thoughts and slurred words and unfinished sentences; the vacant stare; the confusion.

As a human matter, this is heartbreaking. As a political one, it’s disqualifying. Biden is asking voters for four more years to “finish the job.” Given recent reports in The Wall Street Journal about the speed of his deterioration, that’s a promise he’d be unlikely to keep even if he somehow wins the election.

All this has been increasingly obvious for years — and some of us have repeatedly said so . But this is also a time to ask questions of those who saw the president and insisted there was nothing seriously amiss, or that his verbal stumbles were just a function of his stutter, or that his voice may be soft but his thoughts are clear. Were they clueless? Dishonest? Choosing to not see?

Whichever way, they bear some of the blame for trying to prop up a mentally unwell incumbent in order to stop a morally unfit challenger. To those who love the president, starting with his wife, it’s time to tell him: for God’s sake, and the country’s, and his own — don’t run.

Opinion Writer and Editor, reporting from Chesapeake, Va.

The Vast Blur of a Trump Rally

Toward the end of Donald Trump’s post-debate rally on Friday in Chesapeake, Va., when the crowd had been out in the sun and heat for hours and seemed to be powering down, he brought up the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Jan. 6 obstruction cases . A huge cheer went up for the overall subject and the crew he calls the Jan. 6 hostages — a “U.S.A., U.S.A.” chant even started.

On Friday morning, after the catastrophe that was Thursday night’s debate, a few people texted me suggesting that I would really be in for something at the Trump rally in Virginia today.

And the crowd was big and the mood jubilant, right down to the soundtrack, which exclusively consisted of high-emotion songs from bygone times: “Time of My Life,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” “Dancing Queen,” “Nothing Compares 2 U,” Elvis, Adele. People were decked out in July 4 colors: American flag ball caps, cowboy hats, bandannas, T-shirts, shorts and flowing tops.

Before Trump, they heard comments from a slew of former and current Republican candidates, as well as the national anthem and gentle remarks from a Gold Star father who recited the Pledge of Allegiance. From the stage, a good number of speakers described President Biden’s debate performance in brutal terms.

At larger outdoor Trump rallies, the campaign centers on Trump and flanks him with two giant screens. On Friday the effect was to see only Trump, red, white and blue. In the center of the stage and especially on the screens, there he was in a red cap, white shirt and navy suit. And behind him, when a cheer would go up, the people held up blue signs with “Trump” written on them and white signs with his mug shot staring out. The only thing you could see, then, was Trump, his face and his name and the colors of the flag.

Trump, for more than an hour, talked in the anti-migrant and anti-Biden ways that are very familiar, running through topic after topic. (At one point he started talking about the worst tornadoes in history.) But he did not really focus on any one thing or even, really, what most people are talking about today: the debate. He went on longer, it seemed, than the crowd had been looking for.

But this is how it is with Trump, especially the closer you are to him and especially when he was president: Everything just blurs into one long, immersive experience, until you look up and he’s talking about freeing the Jan. 6 prisoners while the “U.S.A.” chant rolls on.

Jesse Wegman

Editorial Board Member

Businesses Cheer Their New Freedom to Violate Regulations

At this rate the Supreme Court is going to need a few more justices just to keep up with all the extra litigation it’s generating on its way to dismantling the administrative state.

On Friday morning the right-wing supermajority overturned one of the court’s most frequently cited precedents and dealt the second blow in two days to the basic infrastructure of American government, voting 6 to 3 to overrule what’s known as the Chevron doctrine .

Named after an oil company case, the doctrine — a decades-old “cornerstone of administrative law,” in the dissent’s words — gave federal agencies the flexibility to interpret ambiguous laws without constant second-guessing by the courts, which deferred to those interpretations as long as they were reasonable. It was adopted, as Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent , for a simple reason: Congress’s laws “will inevitably contain ambiguities that some other actor will have to resolve, and gaps that some other actor will have to fill. And it would usually prefer that actor to be the responsible agency, not a court.”

This may sound complicated, but it’s central to the functioning of modern government regulation. The Chevron doctrine, she explained, has been the key to “keeping air and water clean, food and drugs safe, and financial markets honest.”

To the court’s conservative majority, however, it was just another example of deep-state bloat. “Agencies have no special competence,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court. The problem with this is not only that it’s wrong, but that it was the courts that developed the Chevron doctrine in the first place. In addition to respecting Congress’s intent, they were sick and tired of trawling through thousands of pages of federal law to understand how everything fit together.

Most Americans have no idea how many executive agencies there are, or how complex and technical much of their work is, but the courts do. Now all the tangled questions of law and policy will wind up back in their courtrooms, yet they’re no more equipped to answer them than they were 40 years ago.

This doesn’t have to be a left-right issue. At the start, it wasn’t even controversial. As I noted in response to Thursday’s equally destructive administrative-state ruling, Justice Antonin Scalia, the conservative stalwart, defended the Chevron doctrine’s value, saying in 1989 that it “accurately reflects the reality of government” and “adequately serves its needs.”

It does not, however, serve the needs of America’s business community, which looks at the slew of federal regulations and sees only reduced profits. Deep-pocketed businesses have been the staunchest opponents of the doctrine; along with a raft of committed right-wing activists, they finally managed to get enough like-minded friends on the Supreme Court to kill it off.

Those businesses are predictably thrilled with Friday’s ruling, the practical effect of which will be to save them money by scaring off agencies from imposing regulations that they know will be tied up in endless litigation. The rest of us — at least those of us who drink water, eat food, pay taxes, drive cars, buy products and breathe air — will increasingly be left to fend for ourselves.

An earlier version of this article misidentified the author of the dissent in the Chevron doctrine case. It was Justice Elena Kagan, not Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

How we handle corrections

Jonathan Alter

How the Democrats Should Replace Biden

Two weeks ago, a pillar of the Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill told me that if President Biden performed poorly in Thursday night’s debate, Democrats would yank him as a candidate. They simply cannot let him pull down the entire ticket and turn the country over to a would-be dictator.

That fear, as viewers saw on national television, was borne out, and now panicking senior Democrats have a decent shot at prevailing upon the president to withdraw. He should do so gracefully and instruct his delegates to vote for whoever is chosen in Chicago, where the Democratic convention opens on Aug. 19.

That move would have the short-term advantage of wrecking the Republican convention, which opens in Milwaukee on July 15. The G.O.P. plans to spend four days savaging Biden. If he dropped out, Republicans would have to explain what they want to do for the country, and the public would realize the only answer is: nothing but harm it in unpopular ways.

Biden could help maximize the power of his withdrawal by laying down a few ground rules for the Democrats, which — given his control of delegates and his status as a beloved elder statesman — would very likely be obeyed:

None of the candidates in the next seven weeks — about the typical length of European campaigns, by the way — may attack rivals or spend money on their own campaigns that will be needed in the fall against Donald Trump. If any do, Biden will come out against them.

Only those with a certain threshold of support in polls may take part in any Democratic debates to be scheduled before the convention.

Each qualifying candidate will be granted a half-hour address on the opening night of the convention, with the winner expanding on it in his or her acceptance speech.

The delegates should take into consideration — though not be bound by — state and national polls showing the relative strengths of the candidates.

The candidates should identify possible running mates.

Unlike the 2020 primaries, this summer’s contest would include no viable candidates from the party’s left wing. Two senators, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are too old and have said they aren’t running, nor is anyone from the Squad. If they change their minds, Biden should come out against them.

Some analysts say the delegates would nominate Vice President Kamala Harris. Perhaps, but if she was outshined in speeches and debates this summer by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, Senator Amy Klobuchar, Senator Cory Booker or a dark-horse candidate, Harris probably wouldn’t be the nominee.

Like the bosses of old — and this is how nominees were chosen until the 1960s — Democrats have a political obligation to pick the candidate most likely to win. This becomes a moral obligation in an election in which democracy is on the line.

Rather than a chaotic mess, an open convention would create enormous excitement that would propel the nominee into the fall campaign. And without Biden to trash, Trump would try to slam a new nominee. But after chasing a moving target of possible rivals over the summer, he would have only a short time to make anything stick.

One thing is for sure: Whoever would prevail in Chicago would be a stronger candidate than Biden, who cannot reverse the verdict that he is too old to serve.

W.J. Hennigan

Opinion Writer

Voters Must Decide Who Should Be the King of America’s Nuclear Monarchy

Many Americans watched the first debate of the 2024 presidential election in shocked disbelief as President Biden and Donald Trump bickered, often incomprehensibly, over their mental acuities, legal troubles and golf handicaps.

The disappointing back and forth served as a stark reminder that one of them, as the nation’s commander in chief, could have unilateral decision-making power to wage nuclear war.

The United States has a nuclear monarchy. Only the president can decide whether to use nuclear weapons. That power is absolute; he or she does not need to consult Congress, the courts or senior advisers, as Times Opinion explored in our series At the Brink , about the modern nuclear threat.

The American president’s sole authority to launch nuclear weapons began in practice on Aug. 10, 1945 — just days after the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — when President Harry Truman ordered that such an action could not be taken without the White House’s direct order. It has remained in the Oval Office ever since.

Polling from last August found that 61 percent of Americans said they were uncomfortable with the nuclear sole-authority power. As I wrote in March , “Putting so much unchecked power in the hands of one person is not only risky but also deeply antithetical to how America defines itself.”

In the months ahead, voters will have to decide which person they prefer to make that decision. Biden, who is 81, and Trump, who is 78, would be the oldest candidates in the nation’s history to appear on their parties’ tickets.

Under law, neither man’s age would allow him to pilot a commercial airliner . Or serve in command as a military officer . Or be appointed as an appellate judge in most U.S. states. And in Trump’s case, because of his felony conviction, he is not allowed to own a gun.

Both men are, however, still eligible to control the deadliest weapon arsenal known to man.

Michelle Cottle

Which Joe Biden Is the Real One?

Well, that was adequate.

President Biden seemed back to his base-line self at Friday’s rally in Raleigh, N.C., his first appearance after Thursday night’s debate debacle.

He came out onstage holding Jill Biden’s hand, which was adorable but also helped deflect attention from his stiff gait. He still had a nasty cough, but the eye twinkle and the smile were back. And when other people were speaking, his resting face looked way less slack-jawed. His voice was stronger, his energy level higher and his speech crisper. He didn’t seem frazzled by the hecklers in the crowd who kept interrupting him and who were in turn drowned out by the chants of “Four more years!”

And, yes, reading from a prompter, he managed to deliver a perfectly coherent case against Donald Trump, with an emphasis on the threat Trump poses to women’s reproductive rights, the rule of law and the foundations of American democracy.

It wasn’t a glorious speech. (Donald “Herbert Hoover” Trump”? Seriously, man?) But he did get in a couple of hard jabs about Trump as a felon and an inveterate liar.

For me, the most interesting bit was his reference to last night’s meltdown. “I know I’m not a young man, to state the obvious,” he told the crowd. “I don’t walk as smoothly as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. And I don’t debate as well as I used to. But I know what I do know. I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong. I know how to do this job. I know how to get things done. I know what millions of Americans know: When you get knocked down, you get back up.”

Translation: Everyone has a bad night now and then, and I have every intention of soldiering on.

He then gave the crowd his word “as a Biden” that if he didn’t believe with all his “heart and soul” that he could do this job, he wouldn’t be running.

Um, fantastic? Except that Biden’s belief in his fitness is not the issue, per se. The problem is the yawning gap between his belief and the direct observations of so very many voters.

The Supreme Court Gives a Hand to Hundreds of Jan. 6 Rioters

In a perfect world, Congress would have long ago made a law specifically prohibiting a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol incited by the sitting president in an attempt to block the certification of an election he lost fair and square.

Congress never made such a law, nor has it made countless other laws to cover other scenarios that might one day occur. That would be impossible. Instead, as anyone who has ever tried to make a law knows, you craft general language that can be adapted to specific circumstances later.

That’s not good enough, a majority of the Supreme Court said on Friday morning . In ruling for Joseph Fischer — who was convicted of obstruction for being part of the mob that broke into the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to stop the counting of electoral votes and keep Donald Trump in office — the court decided that federal prosecutors wrongly relied on an Enron-era law that covered only the intentional destruction of physical documents.

The law in question applies to anyone ​​who corruptly “alters, destroys, mutilates or conceals a record, document or other object,” or who “otherwise obstructs, influences or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.”

This sounds very much like what the Jan. 6 rioters did, as Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. “Blocking an official proceeding from moving forward surely qualifies as obstructing or impeding the proceeding by means other than document destruction,” Barrett wrote. And yet the majority executed what she described as a series of “textual back flips” by narrowly interpreting the meaning and placement of the word “otherwise.” Why? Because, she wrote, “it simply cannot believe that Congress meant what it said.”

The court’s ruling overturns only Fischer’s conviction, but it will require revisiting the charges against about 350 Jan. 6 rioters under the same law, including some of the most serious cases of the 1,450 people who have been charged to date. It’s also a law the special counsel, Jack Smith, has charged Trump with violating, among other charges in the indictment. ( It’s not clear whether the decision will require dropping the obstruction charges against Trump.)

That brings us to the deeper problem with Friday’s ruling, which is that we can neither legislate nor prosecute our way to a healthier democracy. Those who stormed the Capitol (whom Trump still refers to as “political prisoners” and promises to pardon if elected) should of course be punished. But whatever happens to them, the man most responsible for the events of that day stands on the cusp of being elected to the White House once again.

That’s why the real blame here lies not with the prosecutors or even the court; it lies with the Senate Republicans who refused to hold Trump to account in the weeks after Jan. 6. Had they voted to convict him following his impeachment, he would not now be eligible to run for president. No federal law, however well written, can make up for political cowardice like that.

Meher Ahmad

Opinion Staff Editor

The Court Forces America’s Homeless to Stay Awake or Be Arrested

The Supreme Court has issued its most direct ruling in decades on the rights of more than half a million people experiencing homelessness in the United States, and it sets a devastating precedent. Now laws that punish people without shelter from sleeping on the streets have a stamp of approval from the highest court in the country.

A divided court ruled in favor of Grants Pass, Ore., a city that seeks to bar people without homes from sleeping in public within the city limits, even if shelter space isn’t available. The majority opinion, written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, claims criminalizing sleeping outside does not criminalize people based on their status. It makes no difference, he writes, if the person is “experiencing homelessness, a backpacker on vacation or a student who abandons his dorm room to camp out in protest on the lawn of a municipal building.”

So-called camping bans — ordinances that prohibit sleeping in public places with blankets, cardboard boxes, tents and vehicles — have proliferated across the country, in reaction to skyrocketing rates of homelessness since the Covid-19 pandemic. This February, Times Opinion spoke to dozens of people across the country experiencing homelessness to better understand their day-to-day realities. Laws that criminalize aspects of homelessness have become a go-to for local governments looking for a quick solution to growing street homelessness. Many of the people we spoke to had been fined or even jailed for sleeping outside.

Homelessness is a manifestation of the many ways the American underclass succumbs to poverty — through the housing and affordability crisis, health care costs and the collapse of welfare systems that once helped Americans on the margins. Bans like the one in Grants Pass ignore these converging forces, instead criminalizing the people who are living through these crises for surviving with whatever means they have left.

The court’s decision is written with a great deal of sympathy for cities and towns. Even Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion gives credence to the feeling that local governments are ill equipped to handle the swelling population of people living without shelter across the country. But, she says, “the majority focuses almost exclusively on the needs of local governments and leaves the most vulnerable in our society with an impossible choice: Either stay awake or be arrested.”

Sleep, she noted, “is a biological necessity, not a crime.”

That cruel choice could now be one that thousands of people across the country could make every night. With this ruling, the court has failed to understand the cruelty of what it means to be homeless in America. That the Supreme Court can’t see them as worthy of a basic right — seeking a place to lay their head at night — speaks to the growing chasm between the people living out America’s policy failures and the people enforcing them.

Paul Krugman

The Best President of My Adult Life Needs to Withdraw

Joe Biden has done an excellent job as president. In fact, I consider him the best president of my adult life. Based on his policy record, he should be an overwhelming favorite for re-election.

But he isn’t, and on Thursday night he failed to rise to the occasion when it really mattered. I could and would complain about the lack of real-time fact-checking as Donald Trump spewed a fire hose of lies and about the general prevalence of theater criticism taking the place of policy analysis. But complaining about those things right now isn’t going to save American democracy in this moment of crisis.

Given where we are, I must very reluctantly join the chorus asking Biden to voluntarily step aside, with emphasis on the “voluntary” aspect. Maybe some Biden loyalists will consider this a betrayal, given how much I have supported his policies, but I fear that we need to recognize reality.

Step aside for whom? Kamala Harris was, by all accounts, an effective district attorney and attorney general, and she has also been quietly effective as vice president, promoting Biden’s policies. Choosing her as his successor would in no sense be settling for less.

It’s true that she didn’t do well in the 2020 Democratic primaries, but her problem then, as I saw it, was that she had a hard time making the case for choosing her over other candidates. She would have no problem making the case for choosing her over Trump.

Maybe some American voters aren’t ready for a Black woman to be president. But I’d like to think better of us than that, and there are several excellent governors she could choose as a running mate.

In any case, although I hate to see Biden in this position, he’s a good man, and I hope he’ll do the right thing.

Nicholas Kristof

President Biden, I’ve Seen Enough

President Biden is a good man who capped a long career in public service with a successful presidential term. But I hope he reviews his debate performance Thursday evening and withdraws from the race, throwing the choice of a Democratic nominee to the convention in August.

One of the perils facing this country, I believe and Biden believes, is the risk of a victory by Donald Trump. And after the debate, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that Biden remaining in the race increases the likelihood that Trump will move into the White House in January.

Biden has never been a great debater, but his voice and manner didn’t put to rest the doubts about his age and effectiveness. Rather, he amplified them. I happened to chat today with a woman who is undecided about whom to vote for — she says she distrusts both Trump and Biden but will choose based on who will do better for the economy — and I bet that now she will be supporting Trump.

In some sense, this may be unfair. This was one debate. A candidate’s physical frailty, hoarse voice and rambling responses may not be good predictors of how that person will govern. But in this election, they probably are good predictors that the candidate will lose in November and not have a chance to govern again.

We see the world through narratives, and one of the narratives about Biden is that he is too old. His performance reinforced that narrative when he needed to shatter it. Biden, unable to puncture Trump’s repeated falsehoods, allowed a convicted felon to win the debate.

Biden can resolve this by withdrawing from the race. There isn’t time to hold new primaries, but he could throw the choice of a successor to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The Democratic Party has some prominent figures who I think would be in a good position to defeat Trump in November, among them Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Gina Raimondo, the secretary of commerce. And there are many others.

My phone has been blowing up with texts from people saying, as one put it: “Dear God. What are we going to do?” Another, also a fan of Biden, texted: “It’s imperative we change horses.” But Democrats have been reluctant to say this out loud and undermine Biden. So it will be up to Joe and Jill Biden to make this choice themselves.

This will be a wrenching choice. But, Mr. President, one way you can serve your country in 2024 is by announcing your retirement and calling on delegates to replace you, for that is the safest course for our nation.

David Firestone

Deputy Editor, the Editorial Board

Biden’s Truth Was Overshadowed by His Stumbles

The president who walked haltingly to the podium as the debate began Thursday night was not State of the Union Joe Biden. There was no sign of the joy and fire that he brought to his speech before Congress in March, which briefly brought life to the hopes of Democrats that Biden had the vitality to run this race.

Instead, his voice was hoarse, he stumbled over facts, and occasionally he seemed to lose his train of thought and became a little incoherent. You could almost hear the whispered gasps of his supporters across the country.

And yet, despite his terrible delivery, Biden was at least telling voters the truth. Donald Trump might have looked more healthy and sounded more energetic, but what came out of his mouth was a mix of word foam and outright lies.

Trump said he never got any credit for getting the country out of the Covid-19 pandemic. Of course he didn’t; his policies and lack of action made the pandemic far worse. He dismissed the huge job gains under Biden as “bounce back” jobs, as if they would have happened automatically, when in fact they were created by Biden’s huge investments and skillful handling of pandemic recovery.

Trump said everyone wanted to end Roe v. Wade, which is nonsense, and stunningly claimed that “the country is now coming together” on abortion, which he said has been a “great thing.”

Biden summoned the strength to call this stuff “foolishness” and “malarkey,” adding that “everything he just said was a lie.” He noted forcefully that the economy was “flat on its back” when he took over from Trump. He reminded the world that Trump was a felon and had encouraged the rioters of Jan. 6.

But the substance (or lack of it) of what the two men said at the beginning of the debate was heavily overshadowed by the way they said it. Biden did nothing to change the minds of those voters who feel he is no longer up to the job, and his performance on Thursday night may mean that many Americans won’t pay attention to whether his thoughts and his actions were the right ones.

Patrick Healy

Deputy Opinion Editor

I’m Hearing High Anxiety From Democrats Over Biden’s Debate Performance

Within the first half-hour of the presidential debate, I heard from three veteran Democratic presidential campaign officials, and all of them had the same reaction to President Biden’s performance: This is a disaster.

By the end of the debate, I was hearing a level of anxiety and alarm from those Democrats and several other party leaders and operatives that I’d never seen in 20 years of covering presidential politics. The discussion turned squarely to the need for the Democratic Party to replace Biden as the 2024 nominee, with four months to go to the election, and how to make that happen.

Could former President Barack Obama talk him out of the race? Could Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader and an old friend? Most of the Democrats agreed that only Jill Biden and the president’s family, and his longtime close aides , could get Biden to reconsider the race.

The Democratic panic was, on one level, a little shocking, given how much Donald Trump lied during Thursday’s debate and, more broadly, because of the threat that Trump poses to American democracy. Trump has already betrayed the Constitution, and Thursday night he wouldn’t promise to accept the 2024 election results and gave a weak answer about opposing political violence. He got worse as the debate went on, hurling unhinged attacks on Biden, even calling him a “Manchurian candidate.” His relative steadiness in the first 30 minutes started coming undone.

But the danger of a second Trump presidency is exactly what is fueling the panic. Democrats say Trump must be stopped. The Democratic nominee must stop him. And what we saw Thursday night was a Democratic president who could not effectively respond to Trump or deliver a memorable line — even when he rightly said of Trump, “Something snapped in you when you lost the last time.”

It wasn’t just that Biden wasn’t landing a glove on Trump on the economy, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Covid, taxes, temperament or anything else that was coming up in the questioning. It was Biden’s voice (low and weak) and facial expression (frozen, mouth open, a few smirks) with answers that were rambling or vague or ended in confusion. He gave remarks about health care and abortion that didn’t make strong points, giving Trump a chance to say lines like, “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said, either.”

Biden is only three years older than Trump, but he looked and sounded 20 years older. One Democratic National Committee official told me before the debate that Biden’s age was Democrats’ biggest problem and texted on Thursday night, “Things have gone from bad to worse.”

One of the other Democrats said Biden looked scared during the debate as he listened to Trump. Another said it was an “emperor has no clothes” performance. The third said of the performance overall, “Don’t ask.”

Several others said that Biden had to drop out and that a governor — Gavin Newsom, Andy Beshear, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro — needed to seek the nomination at an open convention. One said that Vice President Kamala Harris was a key player and voice now in any outcome but not to assume she would be a post-Biden nominee.

None of the Democrats counseled patience or said that the pundits or instant reaction was off base. But I am mindful of how things change. There was anxiety after Obama’s first, bad debate performance against Mitt Romney in 2012. There was confidence in Hillary Clinton’s debate performances against Trump in 2016. There are four months to go before the election, and candidates can recover. Trump being Trump, he has plenty of time to do damage to himself.

Frank Luntz, a veteran focus-group moderator who was holding a live focus group with undecided voters during the debate, wrote of their reactions after the first half-hour of the debate: “The group is so bothered by Biden’s voice and appearance. But they’re getting madder and madder with Trump’s personal attacks.”

“If Trump talks less,” Luntz said, “he wins. If Biden doesn’t stop talking, he loses.”

After the debate was over, Luntz wrote: “Twelve out of 14 say they are now leaning Trump. One chose Biden and one didn’t move. This is an unmitigated disaster for the Democrats.”

New York Times Opinion

What Maureen Dowd, Tom Friedman and Other Opinion Writers Would Ask at the Debate

The CNN moderators get to ask the questions of President Biden and Donald Trump at Thursday night’s debate, but our Opinion writers have a few suggestions of their own.

Binyamin Appelbaum, editorial board member: What steps would you take as president to increase housing production in the United States?

Charles Blow, Opinion columnist: Mr. Trump, how would your policies on the war in Gaza differ from President Biden’s?

Michelle Cottle, Opinion writer: What do both of you say to the significant bloc of voters who are not enthusiastic about their electoral choices this election, who want fresh blood and something/someone different?

Ross Douthat, Opinion columnist: The last few years have seen an accelerating decline in birthrates all around the developed world. This is bad news for economic prosperity and also a national security challenge: If current trends continue, the population of a close American ally like South Korea could be cut in half by later in the 21st century. What, if anything, should be the U.S. government’s response to this mounting demographic challenge?

Maureen Dowd, Opinion columnist: Mr. Trump, it’s been reported that you said Mike Pence should be hanged, due to his conduct on Jan 6. Do you still feel that way?

Mr. Biden, women are being stripped of their rights and you’re running against a felon, yet you’re having a hard time pulling even. Doesn’t that undermine your claim that you’re the best Democrat to beat Trump?

Thomas L. Friedman, Opinion columnist: What was the biggest mistake you made in your four years as president that you absolutely will not repeat if elected again?

What will you do if you win to unite the country and persuade those who did not vote for you that they have nothing to fear from your presidency?

Patrick Healy, deputy Opinion editor: Do you think inflation is getting better or getting worse for Americans?

What’s something that young voters in America should know about you that they might not know?

You’ve both been called fascists by some voters. What do you think about that word, and do you think your opponent is a fascist?

Paul Krugman, Opinion columnist: Mr. Trump, why was your prediction that electing Biden would cause a stock market crash so wrong?

Nicholas Kristof, Opinion columnist: One of the worst things that could unfold in the next administration would be a war with China, so how do you propose to navigate the fine line of deterring but not provoking China? If China blockaded Taiwan, would you order the U.S. Navy to break the blockade?

If China continues to pressure the Philippines in the South China Sea, would you dispatch ships to back the Philippines and confront China? And if we found ourselves losing a conventional war with China, would you reach for nuclear weapons?

Pamela Paul, Opinion columnist: What would both of you tell the graduating seniors at Newtown High School about your plans on gun control?

Farah Stockman, editorial board member: It’s been more than two years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and Russia has put its entire economy on a war footing. The tide appeared to be turning against Ukraine, partly because of the Republicans’ decision to block aid for so long, thanks to opposition by Mr. Trump. How would you bring about an acceptable ending to the war?

Zeynep Tufekci, Opinion columnist: Mr. Trump, you continue to deny the results of the 2020 election. If you don’t respect the will of the people, the bedrock of democracy, how can Americans trust that you will not abuse the vast powers of the presidency to benefit yourself?

President Biden, you got elected on promises to do better than President Trump on the coronavirus pandemic that started in China, and yet your administration seems to be doing too little to stop a potential new pandemic from emerging from the United States. An outbreak of the dangerous H5N1 bird flu virus among dairy cows in the United States is spreading to humans. How can you reassure the American people given this situation?

We invite readers to submit debate questions they would ask by using our comments section.

Beware the Billionaire Blinders

The new issue of Bloomberg Businessweek (its first as a monthly) includes a delicious profile of the libertarian billionaire Jeff Yass, a co-founder of the giant trading firm Susquehanna International Group, who once boldly declared: “What’s the difference between a billionaire and a guy that’s making $100,000 a year? They’re both at home watching Netflix. And they’re both on their iPhones.”

This is right in one way and so wrong in others.

To Yass’s credit, I’m guessing that most of the time, his life really is not that different from the lives of the millionaires and thousandaires who surround him. Get up, go to work, watch Netflix, go to bed. The best things in life are free: the sun in the morning, the moon at night, the occasional solar eclipse . Or almost free: Donald Trump chows down on McDonald’s just like people with a billionth of his net worth.

But Yass’s message — that inequality is a mostly solved problem — is absurd. The Bloomberg Businessweek story cites a 2022 interview with Yass by the Adam Smith Society, in which Yass also said:

“In America, not around the rest of the world, but we’re getting there,” Yass said, “everybody has all the stuff they need. No one’s hungry, no one’s cold, no one doesn’t have some basic, uh, health insurance, so the rising tide gets rid of the real inequality.”

Let’s start with “no one’s hungry.” According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 2022 nearly seven million American households experienced “very low food security,” meaning that “normal eating patterns of one or more household members were disrupted and food intake was reduced at times during the year because they had insufficient money or other resources for food.”

I could go on with “no one’s cold” (what about the unhoused?) or no one doesn’t have health insurance, but you get the idea. One of Yass’s mistakes, I guess, is that he simply can’t fathom anyone earning less than $100,000 a year (a sum substantially higher than the median income ).

Billionaires have their own special kinds of woes, to be sure. Yass, for example, is struggling to keep the federal government from banning TikTok, since he’s a major investor in its parent, ByteDance. But that’s nothing compared with the struggles of ordinary Americans just to make ends meet each month.

No, Jeff, it’s not true that “everybody has all the stuff they need.”

The Supreme Court Neuters a Vital Public Watchdog

The Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority talks a lot about the importance of history and tradition in deciding cases. And yet as those six justices made clear once again on Thursday morning in one of the biggest cases of the current term, only certain histories and certain traditions matter.

The decision, in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy , struck down the S.E.C.’s use of in-house judges to bring enforcement actions against securities fraud. The Seventh Amendment guarantees the right to a jury trial in civil cases, the majority wrote, which means arrangements like the S.E.C.’s — which Congress explicitly created and which are also used by roughly two dozen other agencies — are unconstitutional. If the agency wants to go after securities fraud, it will have to go to federal court.

The problem with this neat-sounding conclusion is that it ignores two centuries of well-established practice to the contrary. When a lawsuit involves the protection of rights of the public generally, juries have never been required. As the Supreme Court affirmed in a 1977 case , Congress’s power to give executive-branch agencies the first stab at adjudicating and imposing civil penalties has been “settled judicial construction … from the beginning.”

Thursday’s ruling is thus “a seismic shift in this court’s jurisprudence,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Its impact will reach far beyond securities fraud, hamstringing similar tribunals in agencies responsible for the environment, public health, food and consumer safety, worker protections and much more.

This is, naturally, the whole point. Led by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court’s conservatives have been engaged in a multipronged assault on the administrative state, which they consider part of a bloated and unaccountable federal government. Their answer is to arrogate more power to themselves. Thursday’s decision, Sotomayor wrote, is “part of a disconcerting trend: When it comes to the separation of powers, this court tells the American public and its coordinate branches that it knows best.” She called it, in fact, a “power grab.”

What the majority refuses to acknowledge is that there is no way the federal courts can handle the volume and sophistication of cases that pass through those agencies.

The irony is that earlier right-wing justices understood that a modern, highly advanced society cannot operate without robust executive agencies. In 1989, Justice Antonin Scalia spoke out in defense of another longstanding administrative-state precedent that the Roberts court appears to be on the verge of crippling , saying it “accurately reflects the reality of government” and “adequately serves its needs.”

Of course, the modern right does not really want to eliminate the administrative state; it wants to control it. As Senator (and vice-presidential hopeful) J.D. Vance explained in 2022 , if Donald Trump is elected in 2024, he should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” If you are wondering who, exactly, “our people” are, then it’s not you.

Opinion Editor and Writer

How Conservative Swing Voters React to a Strong Anti-Abortion Push

Last year, five female legislators in South Carolina tried to stop an abortion ban with a filibuster. They were known as the “ sister senators ” — three Republicans, one Democrat and one independent. Ultimately, the effort failed , and abortion was banned after six weeks in the state.

And as of Tuesday night , all three Republicans have now officially lost to primary challengers this year.

One of the three, Sandy Senn, spoke with Jane Coaston last year for Times Opinion in an interview that’s worth reading front to back, because it dives into the details of the politics as seen through a very specific, gendered Republican viewpoint looking for consistency in policy and more democratic outcomes — and her frustration with men in government imposing a certain idea of what the law should be.

There’s obviously been plenty written about how much the Dobbs decision scrambled conservative politics, how much the anti-abortion movement has struggled with what have turned out to be unpopular policies when put to statewide ballots and how chaotic the courts are now on this subject. But it’s been less clear how much this might reshape the makeup of the parties in the long term. Senn had a prediction about it.

“In reality, we lose elections because this is a losing issue and we lose people that are in the middle,” she told Coaston last year. “People who had previously leaned to the right are now going to lean to the left.”

Along those lines, this week a top Biden campaign official, Jen O’Malley Dillon, made a point to John Heilemann on Puck about persuadable voters, pairing the Dobbs decision and, essentially, Nikki Haley primary voters — a linkage I had not seen made before.

“There’s a whole new cohort that has come in since 2020, who were not available to us [then] who we saw vote in 2022, post-Dobbs,” O’Malley Dillon said. “They are the same people who, in primary after primary on the Republican side, protested Donald Trump. And I definitely think they’re gettable. Is it a small number of states in the scheme of things and a small number of voters who ultimately are on the margins? Yes.”

I think many of these voters probably already voted for President Biden once or avoided voting anyone for president in 2020. That might be right or wrong. But regardless, there is something interesting about what is essentially a practical, smaller-government conservatism of gender — even if it’s for a narrow slice of voters — that is ultimately very reactive to government power being used with aggression, through the prism of abortion policy.

Lauren Kelley

Deputy Op-Ed Editor, News

Idaho Women Appear to Get a Reprieve on Abortion, for Now

As someone who closely follows both politics and reproductive rights, I’ve been very interested in seeing whether a particular Supreme Court decision about abortion would come out before Thursday night’s presidential debate.

On Wednesday, the draft text of the decision in Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States was accidentally posted on the Supreme Court website, Bloomberg News reported .

It’s unclear whether the decision that was posted is final, but if it is then it seems the court will soon vote 6 to 3 to effectively dismiss the cases. The real-world effect, at least in the short term, would be that emergency abortions will continue to be available in Idaho.

At issue in the case is whether a federal statute known as EMTALA , or the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act — intended to ensure that anyone who walks into an emergency room will receive care, regardless of the ability to pay — applies in some circumstances in Idaho, which after Roe v. Wade’s demise enacted a near-total abortion ban. In simple terms, the question before the justices has been whether a pregnant woman in Idaho who is experiencing a medical emergency must be given an abortion, if that abortion would stabilize her health.

A ruling allowing Idaho to ignore EMTALA would be a big problem for Trump’s election, and if it came out before Thursday evening, it could have hurt him in the debate. Abortion has been Trump’s trickiest policy issue. Virtually every electoral data point since Roe was overturned makes clear that most voters do not like strict abortion bans. And Trump, who campaigned in 2016 on a promise to outlaw abortion, not only set in motion the series of events that led to a lot of strict abortion bans being passed around the country, he also bragged about it once the deed was done.

Biden has the upper hand on the issue regardless, but a different court decision ahead of the debate might have given him a gift tied up in bow.

For now, the important thing is that Idaho women appear to have a reprieve. But this isn’t necessarily the end of the story: The court could get another chance down the road to rule on the substance of this issue, just as it could get another chance to rule on access to abortion pills — another case the justices took up but ultimately punted on this term.

Because of Trump’s appointments to the Supreme Court, further threats to abortion remain on the table, regardless of who wins the advantage at the debate.

Biden Restores Honor to Thousands of L.G.B.T.Q. Service Members

President Biden’s decision on Wednesday to pardon thousands of L.G.B.T.Q. service members who had been unfairly punished, discharged or court-martialed for their sexual orientation or gender identity was long overdue. His proclamation will restore benefits and honor to 2,000 or so service members, just atonement for the U.S. military’s long, discriminatory history against L.G.B.T.Q. Americans.

As documented by Allan Bérubé in his exhaustively researched book “ Coming Out Under Fire ,” a cruel, homophobic military culture was forged during World War II. Back then, those accused of homosexuality (often with flimsy or nonsensical evidence) could be subjected to systematic witch hunts, scurrilous interrogations, solitary confinement and “ queer stockades ” rife with harassment . Public discharge records meant that L.G.B.T.Q. service members were outed upon returning home, which inevitably led to further discrimination.

This culture was explicitly formalized after President Harry Truman created the Uniform Code of Military Justice in 1951, which prohibited “unnatural carnal copulation with another person of the same or opposite sex,” effectively criminalizing homosexuality. Over the following decades, L.G.B.T.Q. veterans became some of the country’s foremost L.G.B.T.Q. activists, and discriminatory military policies were among the community’s key targets. Their efforts culminated in the end of the notorious “ Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell ” policy in 2011.

When some of the government’s most prominent institutions declared that a group of people was inferior, many in the country came to believe it. Biden’s pardon, acknowledging flaws in the higher moral standing that the military has long claimed to espouse, redresses a historical harm and reinforces the idea that L.G.B.T.Q. Americans are not inferior.

But the commander in chief chose perhaps the most frictionless, election-friendly way to signal his support for the L.G.B.T.Q. community. And the rest of Washington is allowing another Pride Month to pass without reaching for more daring possibilities.

Congress has yet to pass the Equality Act, a measure supported by the president, which would expand the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protect Americans from discrimination based on their sexual orientation and gender identity. To be frank, the bill has long seemed like a pipe dream, given a divided Congress and a mounting reactionary wave that targets queer people. But the president could do more to pressure both his allies on the Hill and his adversaries to end this overt discrimination.

The president has already earned the title of most pro-L.G.B.T.Q. president in history . But without a law in place, many of his efforts will only last as long as his presidency. What’s the point of attempting to deliver “the full promise of equality” if the next guy to sit behind the Resolute Desk can strip it away with the stroke of a pen?

Alito’s Frustrated Culture-War Diatribe

It often seems that Justice Samuel Alito would be happier swapping out his black robes for the garb of whichever right-wing plaintiffs have arrived before the court to air their culture-war grievances.

On Wednesday, Alito was at it again, dissenting at length from the court’s 6-to-3 decision that threw out a conservative challenge to the Biden administration. The White House had tried to counteract the reams of misinformation being spread on social media sites during the Covid pandemic and the aftermath of the 2020 election, urging social media sites to regulate what was allowed to be posted. Two Republican states and five private citizens cried “censorship!” and said the administration had infringed on their right to free expression, but the court’s majority said they had no right to bring the lawsuit.

Referring to the plaintiffs as “victims” of government censorship who “simply wanted to speak out on a question of the utmost public importance,” Alito wrote grandly, “if the lower courts’ assessment of the voluminous record is correct, this is one of the most important free speech cases to reach this court in years.”

That is a very big “if,” as the court’s majority noted in tossing the suit for lack of standing. Not only could the plaintiffs not show “any concrete link between their injuries and the defendants’ conduct,” but the lower courts’ assessment of the record was, in fact, far from correct. Many of the district court’s findings, on which the increasingly off-the-wall U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit relied, “unfortunately appear to be clearly erroneous,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the court .

During oral arguments in the case, several justices expressed similar concerns with the loose relationship to the truth that Benjamin Aguiñaga, Louisiana’s solicitor general and one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, had. “I have such a problem with your brief,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor told him. “You omit information that changes the context of some of your claims. You attribute things to people who it didn’t happen to.”

Aguiñaga said he was sorry “if any aspect of our brief was not as forthcoming as it should have been” — an unusually frank admission of dishonesty by a government official.

And yet his distortions appeared to pose no problem for Alito, who seemed as eager as any Facebook anti-vaxxer to trample basic facts and evidence in service of the right to spew dangerous lies in public without consequences. As Barrett pointed out regarding Jill Hines, one of the plaintiffs, Alito “draws links that Hines herself has not set forth, often based on injuries that Hines never claimed.”

Making up facts to reach the conclusion you want to reach isn’t a Supreme Court justice’s job, of course, but it’s entirely in character for a committed culture warrior.

Farah Stockman

The World Turns Its Eyes From the Suffering in Sudan

Two months ago, world leaders gathered in Paris and said all the right words about the horror unfolding in Sudan, where a vicious civil war has stolen the dreams of a proud and resilient people, leaving five million people on the brink of famine . In Paris, diplomats pledged $2.1 billion and condemned indiscriminate attacks on civilians, including children.

But nothing has changed.

“Sudan has become one of the world’s largest — and most ignored — man-made human tragedies,” my friend Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, chief executive officer of Mercy Corps , wrote to me recently.

In some cases, the dithering is maddeningly academic, mired in debate about whether the criteria for a famine declaration have been reached. In other cases, it seems that the concern was performative.

“A mere 12 percent of those pledges have been disbursed so far,” Tjada wrote. “Even as the situation is rapidly deteriorating.”

I must admit to being at a loss for what to say about such tragedies sometimes, with so much suffering in this world and so few good policy options. Sudan is a particular heartbreak : In 2019, a peaceful revolution led by doctors, mothers, activists and scholars toppled a longtime dictator in Khartoum, opening the door to what could have been a new and democratic era for the country. Instead, two selfish military leaders derailed the country’s democratic transition and then turned on each other, dragging the country back into a civil war.

But what continue to inspire me about Sudan are the community-based organizations that save lives by running informal soup kitchens and clinics out of their homes. They are the future of Sudan, if Sudan is to have a future. Good people around the world should support them by donating to reputable international organizations like Mercy Corps and Solidarités International that work closely with community groups that persevere, against all odds.

Pamela Paul

Jamaal Bowman Deserved to Lose

Update: George Latimer defeated Jamaal Bowman in the Democratic congressional primary on Tuesday.

In Tuesday’s primary election in the 16th Congressional District of New York, the Westchester County executive, George Latimer, is running against Representative Jamaal Bowman, a member of the House’s progressive “Squad.” The chatter has been all about campaign gaffes and fund-raising. But in this case, it should be about the merits of the candidates.

We’ve heard plenty about the outsize funding for Latimer, particularly from AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group. The question said aloud by Bowman supporters has been, “Why so much money from a foreign government for a local congressional candidate?” The unspoken question has been, “Why are the Jews funding this candidate?”

We’ve also heard Bowman ridiculed for holding a rally in the South Bronx, which he does not represent. Onstage, Bowman proudly curs ed in a manner unbecoming to a public official. There’s also his schoolyard prank in the halls of Congress, pulling a fire alarm to stall a bill and then lying about it.

But let’s put aside money and manners. Let’s even put aside the war in Gaza, an issue on which the candidates strongly differ. (Latimer offers a centrist view broadly supportive of President Biden’s policy, while Bowman has taken a forceful pro-Palestinian stance.)

This election is about substantive issues relevant to the 16th District, which has been redrawn twice since Bowman’s 2020 win to include less of the Bronx and more of Westchester County. Bowman, elected to a largely different district, no longer represents the interests of his constituency.

He voted against Biden’s infrastructure bill, one of the administration’s key bipartisan successes and fundamental to Biden’s re-election, which hinges on independents and the center. By contrast, Latimer has shown himself successful in helping turn a largely Republican district blue and is supportive of abortion rights, gun control and other domestic issues aligned with his district.

This election is also about the future of the Democratic Party, pitting a centrist vision of the party, the growing resonance of which was recently demonstrated by the election of Tom Suozzi in Nassau County, against its progressive fringe. Notably, Hillary Clinton, a Westchester resident and moderate Democrat, has endorsed Latimer . This week, Representative Josh Gottheimer, a co-chair of the centrist Problem Solvers Caucus, also endorsed Latimer .

Bowman has proved himself out of sync with his district, and his re-election would take the Democratic Party in a losing direction. Equally important, based on his record, Jamaal Bowman does not deserve re-election.

Brent Staples

A Brooklyn School District Finds a Path Toward Integration

Elected officials who prefer not to discuss the fact that New York City has one of the most segregated school systems in the United States could soon have no choice. A state appellate court has said that an anti-discrimination lawsuit can move forward.

The suit charges New York with maintaining a “racialized pipeline” through which gifted and talented programs and screening practices condemn many students of color to “neglected schools that deliver inferior and unacceptable outcomes.” If successful, this landmark legal challenge could remake admissions practices at selective public schools.

At the same time, in Brooklyn, a public school district that covers both poor and affluent neighborhoods has shown it is possible to integrate schools — without rancor or a mass exodus of white families — when parents and school officials value integration as a benefit in itself.

As my colleague Troy Closson explained last week, the remaking of Brooklyn’s District 15 began several years ago, when parents expressed a desire to integrate middle schools that were among the most homogeneous in the city. “Selective admissions were scrapped,” Closson wrote. “Every child got a lottery number instead. Schools adopted targets to admit certain numbers of disadvantaged children.” Middle schools set aside seats for students who were from low-income families, living in temporary housing or still learning English. Crucially, the schools fill incoming classes through a lottery, instead of using metrics like grades or attendance.

As a result, the district’s middle schools, which were the second-most socioeconomically segregated, improved to rank 19th out of the city’s 32 local districts. Teachers and students now say friendships are emerging across income lines, and a more diverse set of middle schoolers began taking state algebra exams.

Antonia Martinelli, a parent leader, told The Times: “We’ve managed to debunk this ‘good school-bad school’ narrative. Parents understand that they’re all great schools.”

Integration is hardly a cure-all, and challenges remain. But this example shows that breaking with segregation does not have to involve bitterness and decades of delays.

The Governor’s Race You Cannot Ignore

Partisan hit jobs. Left-wing smears. That’s how Mark Robinson’s aides characterize any attention to his diatribes against Jewish people , gay people, women. They want voters in North Carolina, where he is the Republican nominee for governor, to see him as just another conservative whose straight talk and religiousness come under predictable fire from the ambassadors of wokeness. Nothing to see here, folks, nothing but the usual disdain for MAGA might.

That’s a lie as big as any in an epoch of epic fabulism. And Robinson’s fate will be an especially revealing referendum on just how much, in the America of 2024, tribalism trumps common sense and common decency and voters tune out the truth.

The governor’s race pits Robinson, who’d be North Carolina’s first Black governor, against Josh Stein, the Democrat, who’d be its first Jewish one. To go by polls, it’s a dead heat . But the Stein campaign has only just begun its advertising blitz and three weeks ago released a whopper of an ad that spotlights Robinson’s 2019 remark that abortion “is about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down.”

Robinson’s rants — mocking Paul Pelosi after he was attacked, suggesting that Michelle Obama is a man — are that hateful . And they’re the very foundation of his improbable political career: He was elected lieutenant governor of North Carolina in 2020 almost solely on the basis of a single speech in opposition to sensible restrictions on firearms. His work history included nothing — zilch — that prepared him for political leadership. But he could shout. He could spew.

He has spewed less of late. Ambition can be a gag. But his extremism remains so close to the surface that Paul Shumaker, a Republican strategist in North Carolina, was recently quoted in New York magazine as predicting that “Donald Trump will unendorse Mark Robinson by the time we get to Labor Day.”

Robinson should, indeed, be poison in this purple state. He should be struggling, too, given Stein’s bona fides: eight years as the state’s attorney general, before which he served in the State Senate and was a top aide to John Edwards in the U.S. Senate. There’s not a whiff of extremism about him. But late last month, The Cook Political Report changed its assessment of the Stein-Robinson race from leans Democratic to tossup. In any other year, I’d be shocked. In this one? I’m just terrified.

‘Are You Seeing Any New Signs Biden Can Beat Trump?’

On Saturday my brother asked me a question with some urgency in his voice: “Are you seeing any new signs Biden can beat Trump?” My brother is a 63-year-old independent in Boston who says he “votes the person, not the party,” and thinks President Biden has done about the best anyone could at bringing America back from the disastrous Covid economy. He thinks Donald Trump would be a joke if he weren’t so dangerous.

I told him about some of Biden’s latest messaging and ads emphasizing that Trump is a convicted criminal and a new Fox News national poll that gives Biden a two percentage point lead over Trump and shows more voters feeling good about the economy. Then I said: “To answer your question — not really, no. Nothing game changing. That’s why the debate is so important.”

Biden has to find ways to make people want him for another four years. Being not Trump is not enough. Biden’s biggest problem is that a small but meaningful share of his own supporters — Biden 2020 voters, to be specific — don’t want to vote for him again and they are considering third-party candidates, sitting out the presidential election or voting for Trump.

Yes, political journalists always geek out on presidential debates and describe them as really big deals, but Thursday night’s debate is Biden’s best chance so far this year to start turning things around. He did well at his State of the Union, but it was a teleprompter speech, and I doubt many swing voters were swayed. (He didn’t get a lasting poll bounce.) Trump’s criminal conviction was good for Biden, but Biden hasn’t yet leveraged it to make voters want his decency all over again. An unscripted debate is his best shot and big test.

It’s the economy, really, that’s everything. Biden has to speak plainly and with humility and feeling about what people are experiencing in the economy and how he will address inflation. He can’t tell people what to feel or lapse into defensiveness — which is easier said than done in a debate, where the phrasing of a question or the tone or specifics of your opponent’s answer can send you off track. If Biden gets off track or has a senior moment or two, he will be judged harshly by the many voters who seem unwilling to give him credit for anything.

My bet is that Biden and Trump will acquit themselves pretty well on Thursday (with Trump benefiting from his mic being muted at times, reducing the opportunity for him to sound like a raving nut again). They know the stakes, and both will be a little nervous and rusty. They will probably stick to their core messages, so it comes down to what voters want to hear the most. As my colleague Ezra Klein recently noted , Trump is talking a lot more about inflation and immigration than people may realize, and he talks about it pretty effectively. If he shows some discipline (I know, I know) and persuasively makes it sound that America was better off during his first three years in office than it is now, he could have a good night. No one knows this more than Biden; he needs to play strong offense and even stronger defense, pointing to how bad things got under Trump. The Covid economic train wreck under Trump would be one place to start.