Student Blog: Academic Integrity: Business vs. Theatre

Let me first outline what academic integrity means to me. Personally, I see academic integrity as a fidelity to one's craft; a full commitment to completing something without dishonesty or any method of cheating. Of course, sometimes it’s necessary to work with a friend on an assignment or ask a professor for help, but these ventures shouldn’t be considered a breach of academic integrity. In summation, academic integrity is doing the right thing in relation to one’s studies.

Interestingly, because I study both business and theatre, I see academic integrity arise in vastly opposing ways. The overwhelming majority of academic integrity breaches I see occur in the school of business, not in the theatre program. I’ve come to the conclusion that this is because my university’s business school is so large that for one, the school is physically unable to control or monitor the students endeavors to find shortcuts on assignments or tests, along with the fact that the majority of the business professors assign online material, making it easier for students to use AI platforms such as ChatGPT to do their work for them.

If I am fully honest, I refused to even acknowledge the existence of ChatGPT until about three months ago. I was fully against the platform due to the amount of harm it has done to students across the globe; it has made the point of education essentially nonessential due to its ability to generate anything from prompts to full-fledged professionally-written papers. I downloaded the program to see what it was all about and familiarize myself with it because I know, whether we like it or not, that generative AI is going to play a major role in our future. Personally, I don’t allow myself to use the program for anything more than asking it to summarize a reading once in a while to gain a better understanding of the main ideas. Academic integrity and honesty are important traits to me, and I’m fairly certain my conscience would never allow me to cheat on any academic-related matters.

Looking at the role academic integrity plays in my theatre studies, I notice several incredibly large differences from my business studies. For one, most of the material I’ve worked on in my theatre classes has been performance based. Because of this, it’s virtually impossible for anyone to cheat in these classes. You can either put in the effort to present a solid showing, which is what I strive to do in my classes, or not commit to your craft, in turn leading to a poor performance. Along with this, I’ve noticed that the students in my school’s theatre program generally seem to be more committed to their academic success than those in the business school. The theatre kids tend to be more motivated by personal triumphs (without breaching their academic integrity) than my fellow business students, which they practice by not using programs like ChatGPT as often as others. Again, these are just my personal takes, but I believe they ring true.

In my opinion, my sentiments above explain why theatre (or the arts in general) are important now more than ever: the arts cannot be generated by a computer. Performance cannot be replicated by a virtual data-processing program. While other careers are being streamlined and turned into computer-operated jobs, live theatre will never be replaced. People will always crave the feeling of watching other humans perform live, a fact that has been true for thousands of years and will continue to be true even when we are gone.