Design Considerations to Pre-empt Academic Offences
Here are some strategies that can be implemented in order to curb the use of academic misconduct in your teaching.
- Build Community:
- Spend time building community in the class and collaborating with them on creating a learning environment that promotes mutual respect. This may increase likelihood of students reaching out to you they encountering difficulties. Some good suggestions are available from CITL’s Guide on Creating Community.
- Bring Academic Integrity Into the Open:
- Provide students with opportunities to ask questions about academic integrity or their work in a safe place.
- Flexibility:
- Include flexibility on deadlines. This also has a positive effect of increasing inclusivity.
- Hall Pass, or “Get Out of Jail Free” Pass:
- When students contact instructors to say they cannot meet the deadline for a given assignment, the instructors would give students a one-week extension with no questions asked. Most students do not take advantage of the full week.
- Incentivization:
- Institutions could seek ways to incentivize academic integrity. For example, Academic Integrity could be included in Promotion and Tenure information as a topic to discuss relating to teaching and research.
- Change Focus of Assessment:
- Ditch bell curve grading and focus on student learning outcomes.
- Redesign Assessments:
- Change questions or details of questions regularly. Avoid high stakes assessment. Include more formative assessment with immediate feedback.
- Draft First Question for Quizzes or Exams, etc.:
- One way to ensure students have acknowledged academic integrity when completing an assignment or exam is to build in a statement or question that students need to indicate they’ve seen. For example:
“I will NOT:
- consult with other students or persons, textbook, notes, internet or other sources;
- copy from classmates;
- share questions or answers with others; or,
- plagiarize.”
[Student then selects True or False, or Agree or Disagree, etc.]
Read Promoting Integrity through Assessment Design for more ideas.