January 17, 2012

Strategies to increase academic honesty and discourage cheating

The old adage that an ounce of preventative medicine is more beneficial than a pound of cure can be applied to promoting academic integrity.  Establish expectations in your class and structure assignments to proactively minimize opportunities and temptations to cheat.

Be explicit about the academic honesty policies and expectations for student work in your class

• Include a statement about academic honesty and specific course policies in the syllabus.
• Discuss your policies at the beginning of the term and at the beginning of each assignment. 
• Clearly articulate your expectations:  Can students work with others on this homework assignment?  Can students use old exams, lab reports, and student papers from previous terms to assist them when the study for exams or prepare written assignments? 

Design assignments to minimize opportunities for cheating

• Revise and alter assignments and exams each term.  Instructors who use the same assignments repeatedly tacitly encourage students to recycle work found in old files.
• Create assignments that ask for very specific criteria (e.g., use specific assigned readings as resources in writing essays, frame response in the context of a specific and recent real-world event or problem).
• Include a section of the assignment in which students describe their research or writing process while completing the assignment.

Minimize temptations and opportunities to cheat during exams

• Create multiple forms of exams administered in large classes and maximize the space between students during exam administration. 
• Insist that students put all materials away and only have the exam and response sheet on their desks. 
• Actively monitor student behavior during the exam.
• Require that cell phones be turned off and put away.  Remember that most cell phones can now take photos!

Explicitly link graded assignments to learning outcomes for the course

• Students are more likely to do their own work on an assignment if they understand how the assignment will help them learn the material.  When students perceive assignments as “busy work” that is unrelated to important learning outcomes for the course, they are more inclined to take the shortest (and least ethical) route to completing the assignment.

Discuss the relation between academic integrity and professional ethics in the discipline and the future careers student might follow

• Students are more likely to adhere to principles of academic integrity when completing assignments if they see this behavior as representing a larger value than just following “another institutional rule.”

Davis, S. F., Drinan, P. F., & Gallant, T. B.  (2009).  Cheating in school:  What we know and what we can do.  Malden, MA:  Wiley-Blackwell.

This tip is based in part on suggestions by Debi Griffin, Faculty Development Center, Bellarmine University (www.bellarmine.edu/library/fdc/index.asp), and Barbara Millis, Teaching and Learning Center, University of Texas at San Antonio (www.utsa.edu/tlc/).

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October 20, 2009

Encourage students to evaluate the quality of information sources

One strategy to use to encourage students to evaluate the quality of sources located in a data base search for an annotated bibliography is to require that students locate a larger number of potential scholarly sources for their annotated bibliography than will be required as the “minimum” number of scholarly sources cited in the final paper. Additionally, you might require that each student identify 2-3 sources that they initially thought would be useful sources for the project but later decided that the sources were not relevant or were not useful. Ask students to explain in their annotated bibliography why the rejected source looked promising at first and then explain why the source was ultimately rejected as a suitable source.

When students identify and examine more materials than they are required to include in the final submission, they can break away from the habit of including every source they locate to meet minimum resource requirements for an assignment. Students can then begin to evaluate the merit of including these materials as cited sources. These decisions are an important component of the scholarly evaluation of source material.

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September 29, 2009

Promote Academic Integrity by Leading by Example

Citation practices vary considerably from discipline to discipline. Remember that students may be encountering the scholarship practices in your discipline for the first time when they are enrolled in your course. Moreover, they may bring a variety of scholarship and citation practices from other disciplines (with different traditions and expectations) when they enter your course.

Help students learn discipline-specific scholarship and citation skills by providing explicit examples of these practices in your handouts and other course materials. Follow the editorial guidelines for citation of sources when you identify reading materials in your syllabus. Similarly, use appropriate citations and publication formats in your class handouts. These materials will serve as models for your students when they are preparing their work for you.

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August 20, 2009

Developing information literacy skills

Are you planning to include an assignment in your class that requires a search for relevant resources in the scholarly literature? When students have a large writing assignment or research-based project, they frequently make the error of procrastinating and begin their search for relevant sources too late in the term. In their rush to find suitable materials, students may cut corners and use inappropriate materials or, worse, use materials inappropriately. In addition, many students tend to carry out a search in Google (and the “wiser” students search using Google Scholar).

Consider scheduling a classroom workshop with a Reference Librarian in your discipline to develop student skills searching relevant databases for disciplinary scholarly resources, identify appropriate scholarly sources, and evaluate the quality of information located on web sites. Create an assignment connected to the workshop such as developing an annotated bibliography on the assignment topic as a prompt to begin a large research/writing project early in the term. Creating a series of preliminary assignments related to these projects also serves as a deterrent to problems such as submitting a literature review paper found on a web site.

 

Updated01/17/12 cdw