Welcome to the Teaching & Learning Guide for fostering academic integrity in your courses! 

This guide includes best practices, tips, links, and resources designed to help you: 

• Build community with and between your students;

• Communicate with your students about academic integrity;

• Rethink your assessments and how they fit into a culture of academic integrity;

• Request support from your Instructional Design Partner and the Technology Service Desk.

Encouraging students to value and uphold academic integrity can begin by building community. In other words, students may be more likely to uphold academic standards if they feel that the classroom is a community built on trust, ethics, and integrity. Edutopia suggests that students may not inherently know but rather must be taught the principles associated with academic integrity, such as honesty, respect, authenticity, and social responsibility (Price-Mitchell, 2015). 

There are many ways to build community in your courses.

Reward success beyond grades. 

When students see grades as the only goal of the course, they may justify cheating as necessary in order to receive the highest grade. Strategies like giving students regular (and public) praise for a job well done or encouraging them to apply knowledge outside of the course, such as submitting a project for publication or awards, may help them see the bigger picture of learning the materials.  

Emphasize interconnectedness. 

Creating a classroom culture that emphasizes interconnectedness can allow students to feel that their place within the classroom is important. You may build a sense of interconnectedness through encouraging students to work together toward a common goal or by using encouraging feedback to communicate that each member brings a unique perspective to classroom discussion. 

Intentionally check in with students. 

It is important to check in with students about challenging course concepts in order to adjust course content based on their understanding of the material. However, it is just as important to check in with students’ lives outside of the classroom. Allowing some time in class for students to share their personal lives (as they feel comfortable) can create a sense of belonging and help students feel that they are cared about as people. Whether over course content or personal lives, check-ins can be informal conversations at the beginning of a synchronous class or more formal check-ins using surveys or reflection assignments.

Connect with students by building trust and modeling compassion. 

Building trust happens over time and in small moments. Students appreciate their instructors being honest about their knowledge and showing emotional vulnerability, such as sharing a personal story related to the content or admitting to making a mistake. Students are also more likely to trust an instructor who resolves issues and decides policies based on what works best for everyone, not only the instructor. It may even be helpful to share with students your process for deciding course policies and schedules. 

Promote a growth mindset. 

Helping students develop a growth mindset means they are more likely to focus on development over time, rather than focusing on reaching an end goal (often a grade). Instructors can promote a growth mindset by explaining the difference between a fixed and a growth mindset and encouraging students to focus on one area of growth throughout the course. Creating a grading policy that allows for mistakes can also create growth opportunities by normalizing making mistakes, embracing challenges, and learning from the process rather than the end result. You can utilize resources for talking with your students about a growth mindset. 

What lessons can we learn from incidents of cheating? This 34-minute Teaching in Higher Ed podcast episode discusses the emotional impacts of cheating and how instructors can help reduce the likelihood of cheating.

You can listen to the podcast episode by clicking the Play button below or at the Teaching in Higher Ed website, which also contains a full, edited transcript and links to resources. 

Students will arrive to your courses with diverse understandings of academic integrity. For example, they may have only learned about properly citing sources in their English courses and never learned about avoiding the fabrication of data in the laboratory or other types of dishonesty that occur in various fields. You can help students avoid academic dishonesty by clearly and frequently communicating with them on this topic. Students will be more likely to bring concerns and issues to you throughout the semester when they trust that you care about their success and wellbeing. 

Write Your Own Academic Integrity Statement

TWU provides a syllabus template that includes an academic integrity statement. You can supplement this statement on your syllabus by adding your own expectations, why academic integrity is important to you, encouragement for students to discuss their questions and issues with you, etc. Personalizing this statement will make it more likely that students will view this topic as important to you and see you as someone who wants to help them succeed in this area.

Center Students in the Academic Integrity Conversation

Students are more likely to understand and engage with academic integrity when they are active participants in the conversation about what constitutes integrity and dishonesty (Broeckelman-Post, 2008; McCabe, Butterfield, & Treviño, 2012). You can involve students in academic integrity from the beginning of the semester.

Community Standards

You can create a beginning-of-the-semester activity for students to collaboratively create community standards or a class academic integrity statement. You could create a graded discussion in your course for students to contribute ideas and share feedback. Another option would be to have students work together on this activity via Zoom or in a face-to-face class meeting. You can post the completed standards or statement in the Canvas course for students to reference throughout the semester.

Peer Review Activities

Social learning is a great way to help students recognize and correct academic integrity issues such as lack of citations, incorrect or incomplete citations, fabricating data, etc. in a low-stakes activity. You can incorporate peer review activities into your course so students can work together on eliminating plagiarism issues before submitting a paper or project for final grading. Your Instructional Design Partner can assist you with using the Canvas peer review feature, you can create a discussion for students to post their citations or reference list for peer feedback, you can incorporate peer review activities into Zoom class meetings using breakout rooms, or you can informally pair students together to complete their reviews using collaborative tools such as Google Docs.

Academic Integrity Wiki

Your Instructional Design Partner can help you create a Wiki page in your course, which will allow students to contribute content to the page for other students to see. You can share academic integrity resources you want students to read and encourage them to contribute their own resources to the Wiki throughout the semester. You can import this page into your future courses so the collaboration continues across semesters.

Contextualize Academic Integrity

Without context, students can see academic integrity as unnecessary or optional, especially when they feel overwhelmed with balancing their classes, jobs, and home life. You can help students understand the connection between academic integrity and your field by sharing real-life examples, case studies, and news articles. If there are specific types of harm that occur in your field (e.g., HIPAA violations, copyright violations, intellectual property theft), share resources with students to help them understand what integrity and dishonesty look like in your field. Draw strong connections between the integrity expected by professionals in your field and the academic integrity you are expecting from students. You can share these stories using Canvas Announcements, a Wiki page, a Discussion, or a conversation during a class meeting.

Keep the Conversation Going All Semester

When academic integrity is only mentioned at the beginning of the semester, students are less likely to incorporate these practices into their work all semester long. You can keep the conversation going all semester long so that students continue to learn about and demonstrate integrity.

Utilize Your Office Hours

Let students know that they can use your office hours all semester long to talk with you about academic integrity issues and give them specific examples of what to expect during your meeting time. For example, you could set aside a block of office hours for students to get help with their citations in an annotated bibliography assignment. The more specific you are, the more likely students are to take advantage of office hours.

Spotlight Positive Examples

You can change the conversation around academic integrity into a positive one by spotlighting examples where it is done well. For example, you could include citations in your Canvas course materials when you post PDF articles, YouTube videos, or other content, and you can use Creative Commons images in your course and post the citation below the image. You can also share positive student examples. You might ask a student if you can share their citation or bibliography in an Announcement or during a class meeting, or you could link to well-cited papers from previous semesters for students to review as positive examples. 

Provide Formative Feedback

Provide students with multiple opportunities throughout the semester to receive feedback on their papers and projects. This will help bring to light academic integrity issues before final grading as well as help to build students’ understanding of how to properly cite sources and present data. You can create formative feedback assignments in Canvas using peer review, discussions, breakout rooms in Zoom sessions, etc., and these assignments can be graded individually or can contribute toward an overall participation grade for the course. You can also allow students to submit a draft to Turnitin in Canvas to receive an originality score without penalty. Your Instructional Design Partner can help you create assignments that work for you.

Set Clear Parameters

You can help students act with integrity by clearly stating when and how they are allowed to collaborate with their peers and use resources such as websites, tutoring services, textbooks, etc. For activities that include collaboration, clearly explain what you mean by collaboration and how students should work together on this activity. For example, include a statement in a peer review assignment description that students can offer suggestions using comments in the Google Doc but are not allowed to rewrite directly on the document. This will help students understand how to collaborate on this assignment. 

When collaboration is not allowed in an activity, clearly state this in the activity description. For example, add a sentence in the quiz description that students are not allowed to work together on this quiz, either online or in person. You can also include a link to your course academic integrity statement, community academic integrity standards, and/or the Academic Integrity Knowledge Base article for students to reference. 

You can take advantage of existing resources to communicate expectations for academic integrity in your courses. The following resources are available to all TWU instructors, and your Instructional Design Partner can assist you with creating customized resources to meet your needs.

• TWU provides a syllabus template for instructors which contains an academic integrity statement starting on page 2. This statement includes links to the Student Life Handbook and to avoiding plagiarism resources from the TWU Library. 

• You can add your own academic integrity policy to the template and to your Canvas course in your “Start Here” module, and you can include a direct link to Academic Integrity Knowledge Base article. Students are more likely to navigate to the Code of Conduct when the link is easy to access, formatted for accessibility, and frequently referenced in course materials.

• Center for Development, Design, & Delivery has created templates you can import into your Canvas courses. The “Start Here” page template contains direct links to the Student Life Handbook, Code of Conduct, and the Academic Integrity (The Academic Code of Conduct) Knowledge Base article. Your Instructional Design Partner can assist you with importing templates from the Commons into your Canvas courses. 

• The TWU Library has tutorials on plagiarism you can integrate into your Canvas course. These tutorials include quizzes and badges for students to earn. You can visit the Library Tutorials page to review the available tutorials, find the link to add to your course, and contact the subject guide librarian if needed.

• You can add an academic integrity policy acknowledgement to the beginning of your quizzes (exams) in Canvas using the true/false question type. Once students have reviewed the policy, they can select “True” to acknowledge they have read and will abide by the policy before continuing to the rest of the quiz. Review the step-by-step guide on creating true/false questions, and contact your Instructional Design Partner for support with Canvas quizzes. 

There are many ways to ensure students have fewer opportunities to cheat on assessments in your online courses. Your first instinct might be to switch from multiple choice exams to written assignments, but that translates to more time spent grading papers and instructors seldom wish for that. However, there are ways to promote academic integrity without sacrificing your life to grading.

If you choose to move away from traditional exams, you might create a variety of assessment types that allow you to grade quickly:

• Have students create a short, closed captioned video to explain a concept. 

• Assign students to create an infographic to demonstrate understanding of a topic.

• If you assign frequent papers, grade and provide feedback on a different aspect of the work each time (format, grammar, transitions, etc.). 

• Assign homework questions and grade only one representative sample of each type of calculation.

• Grade for effort and participation rather than accuracy when possible. Repeated interaction with the content increases the likelihood of student success.

• Use time-limited writing assignments with very specific questions. When students understand a concept, they can usually demonstrate that in a minute or two of writing. Extremely short passages can be graded very quickly. 

• Grade using a less restrictive range: 0-5 rather than 0-100. This allows you to grade more quickly. 

If you have students submit papers:

Utilize rubrics.

• Create a detailed rubric for papers. While the initial time required to write out expectations for each level of each criterion may be extensive, grading will be much faster. In addition, the rubric will provide standard feedback to students. You can add additional, more specific comments as needed.

• Attach your rubric to the assignment in Canvas, and it will tally the score as you click to select the criterion the student achieved.

• Provide the rubric to your students before they write. If they know what expectations they are working toward, they will usually try to meet them.

Utilize peer reviews. 

• Let students proof each others’ writings and they will likely catch some mistakes before the assignment reaches you. If you provide your rubric to peer reviewers, this makes it even better.

Scaffold major papers or projects. 

• Break a paper down into parts – topic selection, title page, reference/works cited, thesis statement, methods section, figures/graphs – and have parts due throughout the semester. 

• This requires students to work on the assignment throughout the semester and allows for feedback and corrections along the way. You’ll still grade at the end, but the load will be lighter and overall scores may improve. 

If you decide to keep traditional exams, you might:

Change test questions each semester. 

• If you believe students might have access to old exams, changing the questions frequently is suggested. If this is not feasible for you, consider the next few points.

Use large question pools and create exams that pull a random subset of questions from the pool. 

• Each student taking the exam will receive different questions in a different order.

Shuffle answer choices. 

• Note: make sure you do not shuffle if you have "all of the above" or "both A and C" type answer choices as they will not translate properly when shuffled.

Give more frequent exams worth fewer points.

• Increase the number of traditional exams and lower the stakes on each. The stress of high-stakes exams tends to increase cheating.

Apply an appropriate time limit for the exam. 

• For multiple choice questions, 45-60 seconds per question is usually sufficient for students who have prepared and insufficient for students to search for answers.

Increase the cognitive complexity of exam questions.

• Include application questions in addition to those that rely on recognition or recall. Keep in mind that more complex questions will take longer to grade, so you may choose to include only a few of this question type on each exam.

• Ahmed, S., & Rosen, L. (2019). A Growth Mindset: Essential for Student and Faculty Success. Faculty Focus. https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/philosophy-of-teaching/a-growth-mindset-essential-for-student-and-faculty-success/ 

• Broeckelman-Post, M.A. (2008). Faculty and Student Classroom Influences on Academic Dishonesty. IEEE Transactions on Education, 51(2), 206-211. https://doi.org/10.1109/TE.2007.910428

• Cohn, J., & Plotts, C. (2021). How to Structure Your Online Class for Inclusion: Two Principles for Fostering Engagement, Part 2. Faculty Focus. https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/online-student-engagement/how-to-structure-your-online-class-for-inclusion-two-principles-for-fostering-engagement-part-2/ 

• McCabe, D., Butterfield, K., & Treviño, L. (2012). Cheating in College: Why Students Do It and What Educators Can Do about It. The John Hopkins University Press. 

• Pendleton, L. (2020, August 13). Back to Class: Growth Mindset. ACUE Community. https://community.acue.org/blog/back-to-class-growth-mindset/ 

• Price-Mitchell, M. (2015, June 9). Creating a Culture of Integrity in the Classroom. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/blog/8-pathways-creating-culture-integrity-marilyn-price-mitchell 

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