Academic Integrity

Academic Integrity

Academic integrity encompasses many areas, including plagiarism (intentional and otherwise). The integrity of your students is obviously critical to authentic academic success and the changes and growth that come with that, and there are many approaches to ensuring it, such as :

• Promoting and supporting a community of integrity.
• Understanding what cheating is and why students might engage in it (so that you can productively and generously guide them).
• Designing your course using a pedagogical approach that is both resistant to cheating and minimizes the benefits of doing so.
• Using technology to make cheating more difficult.

Understanding Cheating

Before trying to address cheating, it's important to understand the problem. First, and most importantly:

There is no conclusive evidence that students cheat more in online or hybrid courses than they do in traditional classes.

The fear of cheating in online courses is, nonetheless, higher.

Why Do Students Cheat?

In their training materials, UW Bothell faculty and staff point out the most important reasons:

Extrinsic Motivation. If learners are motivated to learn primarily through rewards, grades, or external approval (e.g., parents, instructors, or admissions committees), cheating is more likely. Fear of not impressing others or not getting a good job can make the stakes seem disproportionately high. If learners feel pressured to be perfect, they may resort to cheating.

Lack of relevance. If a learner cannot see the relevance of a particular assignment, they may justify cheating, particularly if they feel overwhelmed by other responsibilities.

The Rochester Institute of Technology summarizes the other most common reasons:

• Desire to get a good grade
• Fear of failing
• Procrastination or poor time management
• Disinterest in the assignment
• Belief they will not get caught
• Confusion about what constitutes plagiarism or current university policies

How to Prevent Cheating

There are two fundamental approaches to preventing cheating: pedagogical (through instructional design) and technological (through surveillance and control). Let's consider both.

Pedagogical Strategies to Promote Academic Integrity

As you'll see in the next part of this module, the technological approaches (protection) to preventing cheating come at considerable cost in terms of technology requirements, privacy, and literal costs for software access and licenses.

Design strategies (prevention) also have costs, though, particularly in time and effort: creating a community of integrity and devising, participating in, supporting, and evaluating authentic / alternative assessments can take a significant amount of time and intellectual labor. But the rewards are also potentially great, creating richer learning experiences for students and increasing retention.

Let's take a look at some of these design strategies.

Clearly and Explicitly Define Cheating

Share the academic integrity policy of UW along with those of your school and program, linking to full version(s) if you are synopsizing. Use explicit, active language. For example, see what the Milgard School of Business includes in their template.

Openly Discuss the Consequences of Cheating

In addition to sharing the practical, short-term consequences of cheating, convey to the student the long-term ramifications.

Increase Awareness of Academic Support Resources

The template provides links to resources for students in a few places, including the writing and quantitative labs, but emphasizing those most useful for your course—and reminding them about them along with assignment instructions, etc.—makes it more likely your students will use those resources instead of resorting to cheating.

Help Students Understand How to Study

Perhaps surprisingly, university students often do not know how to study, even at the graduate level! Sharing resources about how to study, how to engage with texts, etc. can help students prepare, reducing the perceived need to cheat. Having students prearrange some of their study by creating guides, flash cards, concept maps, or the like—or providing reading guides and the like—can help. In fact, many of the reading engagement strategies also serve this purpose.

Have Students Assert Their Academic Integrity

Ask students to actively assert their intent not to cheat in the course. This is the last item in the prep modules in the template. This should be paired with some kind of similar assertion, even in the form of a checkbox, with significant assignments.

Reinforce How Your Course Connects to the Future

Recall that cheating can be the result of not understanding the relevance or importance of an assignment. This matters at all levels, including the purpose of the course and how the student's performance in it could impact their future in their course of study, the discipline, or their working career.

Require In-Course References

Requiring students to explicitly reference or otherwise link to specific parts of the course, course materials, or previous assignments makes it more difficult to cheat by appropriating material from other sources.

Choose High-Stake Assignments Carefully

If poor performance in a single assignment or assessment can scuttle a student's chances at a satisfactory grade, they will be more tempted to cheat. There is a place for high-stakes assignments, but the choice to use them should be determined by the learning objectives rather than a mean of signalling importance.

Create a Safe Environment for Learning  (Including Mistakes)

Limiting high-stakes assignments and assessments is part of a larger motif of creating a safe learning environment. Students are in your class to learn, not to already be accomplished: there should be room to make mistakes and to perform poorly with a reasonable chance to doing better and showing improvement. If a student feels the pressure to get it right the first time with no recourse if they don't, they will be more inclined to cheat.

Think Through Where Closed & Open Assessment Fit

Many assessments are "closed book" for little or no apparent reason. Traditional assessments, in particular, are often administered this way without much thought given as to why. If, in the real world, a student will routinely use resources, it might be that they should be able to do so at points in your course as well. Again, this isn't a recommendation not to have closed book assessments or high-stakes assignments, but to choose them carefully.

Use Scaffolded Assignments

A "scaffolded" assignment is one in which a larger assignment is broken into smaller pieces that focus on the things needed to complete a larger assignment or assessment. Such assignments are necessarily much more difficult to cheat by simply downloading a finished product or even having someone create that product.

The classic example is writing a paper. A scaffolded version of writing a paper might involve the following steps, each of which are submitted, though not all will necessarily be evaluated deeply: devise an idea/thesis, write a proposal, create an outline. perform a lit review, and create multiple drafts...all leading up to submitting the final paper (perhaps with copies of the references).

Create Assignments that Require Higher-Order Thinking

The more an assignment or assessment demands higher-order thinking (the further along Bloom's Taxonomy the thinking required resides), the more difficult it will be to cheat.

Use Authentic / Alternative Assessments

As we've shared earlier, authentic / alternative assessments are naturally resistant to cheating.

Require Student Reflection

Requiring students to reflect on their learning: how they pursued the assignment, what challenges they faced, the resources they used, the questions they still have, etc., add a layer to assignments that students will find harder to cheat.

Technical Strategies to Promote Academic Integrity

Technological strategies to prevent cheating in online assessments come in three basic forms:

1. Plagiarism detection software for written assignments
2. Maximizing quiz security settings for Canvas Quizzes
3. Using proctoring software to monitor students taking Canvas Quizzes

Plagiarism Detection Software

Plagiarism detection software detects plagiarism by comparing a learner's work against a database of other learners' work and against a search of internet sources. If the work submitted by a learner has passages that match writing in the database or web sources, the software will flag the similarity in a report to the instructor and learner.

The University of Washington is transitioning to SimCheck, a plagiarism detection tool. The Faculty Council on Academic Standards and Faculty Council on Teaching and Learning guidelines require that faculty "notify their students in advance that they may be using a plagiarism detection service."

In addition, UW IT notes that "Instructors may not submit papers prepared by UW students to other Internet services to evaluate plagiarism. Plagiarism detection should be conducted only through services that have an approved contractual relationship with the UW."

In Canvas, SimCheck can be enabled on any assignment that involves submitting text or a document. See the How to Use SimCheck (Formally Vericite) Plagiarism Detection page for more directions.

Maximizing Canvas Quiz Security

For administering Canvas Quizzes, most faculty, including some who previously required proctoring software, find that simply setting their quiz up securely works well, without the added technical challenges—or security and data privacy concerns—of proctoring systems.

The "Quiz Settings to Maximize Security" (Links to an external site.) Canvas Guide covers these options in detail.

Proctoring with Proctorio

UW no longer centrally supports Proctorio, an online proctoring tool, but your school or unit might. For more information, contact: help@uw.edu

Concerns about Proctoring and Anti-Plagiarism Systems

University administrators and faculty are increasingly concerned about the impact anti-cheating software and services have on learners' data privacy. Many anti-plagiarism tools use learner data and learner-generated essays without clear consent from the learners themselves, raising questions about data privacy and intellectual property. Additionally, some researchers wonder whether the facial recognition/comparison and behavioral tracking used by some educational technologies are contributing to the rise of a culture of surveillance in higher education. 

Additionally, anti-cheating software isn't free. Proctoring services raise the cost of instruction. 

Finally, anti-cheating software also can seemingly raise the stakes of an assignment, exacerbating one of the mindsets that prompts learners to cheat in the first place.

Please, choose proctoring or anti-plagiarism software with great care.