Academic Integrity Resource for Students

Courage is the mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty.

Courage is an element of character that allows students to commit to the quality of their education by holding themselves and their fellow learners to the highest standards of academic integrity – even when doing so involves risk or prompts negative consequences from peers. Being courageous means acting in accordance with one’s convictions.

Being courageous means acting in accordance with one’s convictions. Like intellectual capacity, courage can only develop in environments where it is tested. Academic communities of integrity, therefore, necessarily include opportunities to make choices, learn from them, and grow. Through this iterative process, courage and the five additional values of academic integrity can develop as interwoven and mutually dependent characteristics.

Students who exhibit courage hold themselves and their fellow learners to the highest standards of academic integrity even when doing so involves risk of negative consequences, such as a bad grade, or reprisal from their peers or others.