Record Detail

International students often turn to various sources for help, including writing center
tutors, friends, faculty mentors, online sources such as Google translate, and proofreading and
editorial services, among others.While receiving help from these sources is both understandable
and somewhat expected, what type and level of help is appropriate or ethical is not always clearly
defined. The current research study investigates perceptions of faculty and international students
at one U.S. university as to what is ethical in academicwriting help for international students in 17
different scenarios. Findings suggest that students, far more than faculty, lacked certainty and
agreement on whether certain help they may receive is ethical. The two groups’ views also varied
on machine translation and the use of for-pay editors. Faculty, in general, had the least agreement
on the use of machine translation and the use of a for-pay editing service for sentence- and
discourse-level help and expressed that specific contexts and instructor’s expectations should be
taken into consideration. Also, perceptions of students from East Asia showed notable differences.
We argue that establishing and communicating clear guidelines concerning writing help
should be part of any policy of academic integrity and present an Bethicality index^ to help begin
conversations as each institution, program, or faculty establishes the boundaries of ethical writing
help in a specific context.