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Glossary of Terms

The following list of terms includes words and phrases commonly used in discussions related to academic integrity at Saint Louis University.

These definitions have been compiled from Oxford English Dictionary, Techopedia and SLU AI Policy.

Academic integrity - Academic integrity is the commitment to and demonstration of honest and moral behavior in an academic setting.  The University and wider academic community is built on shared values and norms of behavior, including honesty, fairness, and responsibility. Academic integrity means putting those values into practice by being honest in your academic work, being fair to others, taking responsibility for learning, and following the conventions of scholarship. It is the University's responsibility to award credit for honestly conducted work, and it is every students’ responsibility to ensure the demonstration of academic integrity by:  using information appropriately, according to copyright and privacy laws; acknowledging where the information used comes from; not presenting work as the student's own whether taken from another person or generated by artificial intelligence technology; conducting research ethically, in line with the University's regulations on human research ethics; reporting research truthfully; and acting in an ethical manner in all academic endeavors. 

Artificial intelligence - The capacity of computers or other machines to exhibit or simulate intelligent behavior; the field of study concerned with this. Abbreviated AI.

Chatbot - A chatbot is a computer program that simulates human conversation through voice commands or text chats or both.

ChatGPT - An AI chatbot that uses natural language processing to create humanlike conversational dialogue. The language model can respond to questions and compose various written content, including articles, social media posts, essays, code and emails.

Cheating - Cheating is the presentation or representation of content (including thoughts, words, or data) created by someone other than the student, or by any artificial intelligence or other technology not permitted by the instructor, as if the content were the student’s own without proper citation and without the instructor’s permission.

Citation - The action or an act of quoting or referring to a passage, text, author, legal precedent, etc., esp. as an authority or in support of an argument; quotation.

Collusion - Collusion is the unauthorized collaboration in a deceitful manner with another person or persons for the purpose of giving or gaining an academic advantage in the completion of an assignment, quiz, or examination that has been restricted to individual effort. Collusion does not include receiving assistance from peer-learning advisors or other University teaching staff, when authorized. Collusion may include, but is not limited to:

• two or more students developing a plan that enables them to improve their performance on an assignment or examination that the instructor intended to be completed independently;
• paraphrasing another student’s assignment and submitting it as their own;
• relying on other group members to perform all the work;
• having another individual or group do your assessment task. 

Concealment - Concealment is the failure to report to the instructor or to call to the attention of an instructor or administrator any matter where a student knows of facts indicating a significant likelihood that a violation of this Academic Integrity Policy has been committed or that an academic unit requires be reported, including the behaviors described in the definitions in this section.

Contract cheating - Contract cheating refers to a form of academic dishonesty where individuals or entities, often external to the educational institution, provide students with completed assignments, essays, or other academic work, and students then submit this work as their own. This practice goes beyond traditional plagiarism, where students might copy and paste from sources without proper attribution. In contract cheating, students essentially contract someone else to produce original work for them. 

This external assistance can take various forms, such as hiring a third party to write an essay, complete a project, or take an exam on behalf of the student. It is a violation of academic integrity and ethics because it undermines the educational process, misrepresents the student's abilities, and compromises the assessment of their academic performance. 

Egregious - In the context of higher education, the term "egregious" is used to describe actions or behaviors that are particularly severe, shocking, or outstandingly bad in relation to academic conduct. When applied to academic integrity, an egregious violation refers to a serious breach of ethical and honest behavior that goes beyond minor infractions. 

Falsification - Falsification is the misrepresentations of fact for academic gain. Falsification may include, but is not limited to: 

• lying to or deceiving an instructor regarding academic work;
• fabricating or misrepresenting documentation or the data used in completing assignments;
• unauthorized misrepresentation or alteration of any information in the academic records of an instructor, academic or administrative department, or unit of the University.

Generative AI - Generative AI is a broad label that’s used to describe any type of artificial intelligence (AI) that can be used to create new text, images, video, audio, code or synthetic data. ChatGPT is a type of generative AI.

Hallucination - In artificial intelligence, the term "hallucination" can be used to describe situations where a machine learning model generates outputs that are not accurate or meaningful in the context of the input data. This could happen when a model is trained on a particular dataset and then encounters data that is significantly different or outside the scope of its training data. The model may produce outputs that seem plausible but are not grounded in reality.

Large language model (LLM) - A large language model (LLM) is a type of machine-learning model that can perform a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including generating and classifying text, answering questions in a conversational manner and translating text from one language to another.

Pattern of behavior - In higher education, a "pattern of behavior" typically refers to a consistent and recurring set of actions or conduct exhibited by an individual over a period of time. This behavior may be observed in various contexts within the educational environment, and it could encompass a range of actions, attitudes, or practices. A pattern of behavior in higher education could include both positive and negative aspects, depending on the context.

Plagiarism - Plagiarism is the presentation or representation of content (including thoughts, words, or data) created by someone other than the student, or by any artificial intelligence or other technology not permitted by the instructor, as if the content were the student’s own without proper citation and without the instructor’s permission. This includes self-plagiarism defined as the use of material prepared for one class and submitted in another without proper citation. Plagiarism may include, but is not limited to:

• directly presenting the written, artistic, or spoken work generated or created by someone other than the student or by any artificial intelligence technology without quotation marks or indented quotations and without proper citation to the source;
• presenting information from the internet or any artificial intelligence technology to appear to be the student’s own work;
• paraphrasing or incorporating the ideas, concepts, arguments, observations, images, objects, music, or statements generated or created by someone other than the student or by any artificial intelligence technology without proper citation of the source;
• submitting as the student’s own, any work that has been prepared, either entirely or in part, by another person, group, commercial firm, or artificial intelligence technology without proper citation.

Preponderance of evidence - Preponderance of evidence is a standard used to determine the outcome of a dispute. It is also referred to as the "balance of probabilities" standard. In contrast to criminal cases, where the standard is often "beyond a reasonable doubt," the preponderance of evidence standard is a lower threshold.

The preponderance of evidence standard means that a party must show that it is more likely than not that their version of the facts is true. Essentially, if the evidence tips slightly in favor of one party, even if it's just a 51% likelihood, that party should prevail. This standard is used to assess the credibility and persuasiveness of the evidence presented by each side in a dispute. 

Sabotage - Sabotage is the presentation or representation of content (including thoughts, words, or data) created by someone other than the student, or by any artificial intelligence or other technology not permitted by the instructor, as if the content were the student’s own without proper citation and without the instructor’s permission.  

Sanctions - Sanctions refer to penalties or punitive measures imposed on individuals or entities for violating rules, policies, or codes of conduct established by the educational institution.