Student Blog: Academic and Artistic Integrity for Teen Creatives

In 2024, academic and artistic integrity are becoming more and more relevant to student life. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill defines academic integrity as “the commitment to and demonstration of honest and moral behavior in an academic setting.” Essentially, in artistic and academic settings, integrity is “acknowledging the contributions of other people” (UNC Chapel Hill). In an era where plagiarism is running more rampant than ever, integrity is key to being both a strong student and a strong theatre maker.

Integrity can take many forms in my life. In academic settings, there are the obvious expressions of integrity, such as not cheating on tests and appropriately crediting sources on research papers. In addition to these, there are also more nuanced ways to express academic integrity. When educating my peers on current events or engaging in academic debates, I always acknowledge just how much I know about an issue. I will never try to speak with unnecessary vigor on a subject that I lack an entire understanding of. This develops my personal credibility in academic settings while also deepening the relationships I am able to form with both my teachers and fellow students. 

The maintenance of honesty and fairness in all educational endeavors is what characterizes academic integrity for me. Upholding ethical standards involves creating work that genuinely represents my own efforts and ideas. The significance here lies in shaping the core of my educational process as well as fostering personal development and guaranteeing that my accomplishments truly reflect my actual knowledge and hard work. This instills a sense of responsibility and ethical conduct and contributes to the development of a dependable academic community.

For a teen artist, compromising situations can sometimes inhibit potential for integrity. The number-one culprit, as always, is just how busy we tend to be. I have discussed in great detail the conflict between the different areas of a teen artist’s life (see my previous article, "Balancing School, Theatre, Work, and Having a Life"), and this conflict can easily create gateways to hindered academic integrity. Would it not be easier just to AI-generate an essay after a long day of rehearsal? Or get home from a day working on the set and just copy the answers to the math homework from the back of the textbook? Perhaps, but then, besides the grade, what is the point of even doing the work?

I will be the first advocate for prioritizing one’s mental and physical health over everything else, including getting an appropriate amount of sleep, but cheating is not the resolution that some seem to think it is. Sometimes, maintaining academic integrity requires coming up with creative solutions. In my life, I schedule out my homework assignments for my online class months in advance, scheduling around the nights when I have performance-related commitments and doing more work on the nights when I may not be as busy to ensure I can put my best foot forward on each assignments. For nightly homework that I may get from math, APUSH, or AP Lang, I use whatever time I have during the school day to free up as much of my night as possible, since I will need all the time I can get. If I finish my classwork early in one class, I will always try to choose to work on homework for another class or get ahead somewhere academically as opposed to doom scrolling on various social media platforms. Academic integrity presents some additional challenges to teen creatives, but what is being an artist without being willing to put in some extra hard work?