Scholarly and Professional Integrity Training Requirement for Graduate Students: Resolution for Faculty Senate Approval (11/28/11)


Proposed Resolution
Students graduating with a master’s or a doctoral degree from WSU will, as part of fulfilling their graduation requirements, successfully complete training in the following four broad topical areas:
(1) Research Misconduct,
(2) Publication Practices and Responsible Authorship,
(3) Conflict of Interest and Commitment, and
(4) Ethical Issues in Data Acquisition, Management, Sharing and Ownership.


Each graduate program will develop a plan about the detailed content within each of these four topical areas and how this training will be provided to the students. Programs will have complete flexibility to tailor the training to their disciplinary context and about the mode of delivery. Programs may require additional training topics based on the need of their discipline and will follow their departmental/college and institutional procedures for detailed content development and how the training will be provided. The following two-step process for the roll-out of this Scholarly and Professional Integrity training requirement will be used.

First, this training would be a graduation requirement for all doctoral students, beginning with students with initial enrollment in the Fall 2012 semester.
Next, beginning in Fall 2013, all new masters students (thesis and non-thesis) would be required to complete this training as part of their graduation requirement.
It is recommended that graduate students be advised to fulfill this required training by the end of the students’ first academic year in their graduate program at WSU.

Approval Process for This Resolution
Step 1.
Faculty Senate is being asked to consider this resolution and it can vote on this or it can ask that this be voted on in a General Graduate Faculty Meeting (Graduate School procedure/rules for meeting and approval will apply)
Step 2.
Assuming a positive vote on the resolution (either by Senate or by the Graduate Faculty), Graduate School will ask each graduate program to submit a plan that will include detailed content in each of the four areas and specify how the training will be provided. Programs will follow through with Curriculum Change Forms (CCF) as is required for any change in curriculum or degree requirements. CCFs will follow established approval process.

Additional Information
The full report of the faculty committee that made this graduation requirement has been posted on the Graduate School webpage, under Faculty/ Administration Resources link on the left of the homepage.