Academic Integrity Guidelines for Essay Testing

Written Reminder of Verbal Teacher Remarks Made in Class the Week of November 6 

• You may discuss the readings with your peers during the weeks we are first reading them and analyzing them. 

• You may work through questions you have regarding individual Harkness discussions (e.g., John Calvin’s doctrine of predestination). 

• You may discuss and link the day’s discussion to the broader essay question for the unit immediately in the aftermath of the discussion in personal discussions. 

• You may present a single and verbal example of what constitutes relevant material for a test question (e.g., I think the use of the printing press is relevant to this question). 

• You may not share your organizational structure (the topics of your body paragraphs) 

• You may not share your thesis statements 

• You may not share your quotes. 

• You may not share your notecard, when one is permitted. 

• You may not use technology such as group text or a Google document or otherwise to jointly prepare for catenas (short answer) or essay test questions. 

• You may not share your individual work on catenas (short answer) or essay questions by group text, Google document or otherwise.

In sum, we should not recognize your essay in another student’s essay.  For example, we should not be reading essays and see the same thesis or the same quotes used in the same fashion.  The only reason we have provided the catenas and essay question in advance was to allow you to prepare unique and deeply analytical answers to the questions using textual evidence, allowing you adequately time to review and synthesize the readings, discover your own novel patterns of evidence, and develop individual arguments driven by your personal understanding of the material.  

As you enroll in more advanced classes, you will find that you will be assessed through tests that ask you to respond to unannounced questions in essay format.  It is imperative that you begin to understand how to take an essay test under those circumstances. We believed, as others do, that announced questions would provide an important pedagogical bridge to get you there.  

If this conduct reoccurs, we have two choices that will affect you as a GROUP: we will either no longer announce the question in advance or no longer allow you to bring a notecard to the classroom with your prepared evidence.  Keep in mind that on an INDIVIDUAL basis, we will refer ALL FUTURE CASES to the Dean of Students under the Academic Integrity Policy.