Academic Integrity

Students may not be familiar with the university’s academic misconduct policies. As an instructor, there are a few things that you can do to help increase their awareness. 

• Ask students to review the policies section of your course outline and review the policies with them during the first week of class.
• Consider holding a discussion focused on academic integrity early in the term to highlight your expectations for student work. Discussion questions could include:
  • What is plagiarism? What does it look like? Why is it wrong?
  • When is it okay (and not okay) for students to collaborate on an assignment?
  • What are the consequences of plagiarism? cheating?
  • What resources are available to students that can help them succeed on assignments and exams?
• Consider sharing academic integrity resources with students. These resources could be reviewed in lecture/tutorial or incorporated into the course OWL site. See Resources below for ideas and inspiration. See Resource below for ideas and inspiration, including the Academic Integrity OWL Tutorial for Students.

Even when students have a broad understanding of plagiarism, they may not know how to paraphrase ideas or cite sources using specific citation guidelines.

• Consider reviewing essay writing approaches with your students, including your expectations around paraphrasing and citation.
• Some faculty break up major writing assignments into a few components. For example, submitting an annotated bibliography or first draft gives students the opportunity to practice and receive feedback before submitting a final draft.
• Connect students with campus resources that provide students with writing support. For example, Western Libraries provides guides to common citation formats for students.

Sometimes students do not know why they must complete an assignment and if the value of the assignment is unclear, students might be tempted to find shortcuts (e.g., copying and pasting text).

• To increase student motivation, explain how completing the assignment will help them develop research and communication skills and why these skills are valuable. Explain the consequences of not developing these skills.
• Consider reviewing your assignments on occasion. Do they continue to be relevant, meaningful exercises for students? Do they align well with your learning outcomes for the course?

Balancing the demands of assignments and exams across several courses may be overwhelming for some students. Consider what you can do as an instructor to help students negotiate academic stress.

• Estimate how much time students will need to prepare for class, complete assignments, and study for exams. Or ask your current students to provide these estimates so that you can share with students in the following term. Previous students could also share strategies for success in the course.
• Consider providing progress reminders throughout the course that will help them stay on track. For example, you might share due date reminders in class or post announcements to OWL.
• Clarify when it is okay for students to collaborate on assessments and when they are expected to work independently. If you would like students to work independently, consider how you ensure that they do so – how will you detect collaboration if it does occur? Be sure to explain the value of working collaboratively and independently in different contexts and why those contexts might change across your course.
• Adhere to the university’s examination policies for midterm and final exams. In addition, simple strategies like seating students at a distance from one another, or printing two versions of the same exam (questions ordered differently) may help to reduce cheating during exams.
• If you plan to recycle some exam questions year-to-year, do not return exams to students. However, ensure that you make time available to students to review their work.
• Consider revising/modifying assignments and exams regularly to ensure that graded work is not passed from one cohort of students to the next.

When planning or revising your course, consider where preventative strategies might be useful, and what will be required if academic misconduct does happen. 

• Familiarize yourself with Western’s academic policies on Undergraduate Scholastic Discipline and Administration of Exams. These policies provide clear courses of action for addressing academic misconduct.
• Talk to colleagues about the typical instances of misconduct they see in the department, and what they do to prevent these issues.
• Decide where you will introduce academic integrity guidelines into your courses. How will help students develop their skills as novice academics?
• What method(s) will you use to detect plagiarism in student assignments (e.g., Turnitin)? How will you follow-up with students on flagged assignments?
• Discuss academic integrity with your Teaching Assistants. Ensure that your TAs understand your expectations around academic integrity and what steps they should take if they believe a student has plagiarized/cheated.

Motivate student performance by demonstrating the importance of academic integrity.

• Model scholarship by citing your sources on lecture slides and in OWL.
• If you provide expectations, be sure to consistently follow-up with students if the expectations are not met.
• Be positive in supporting students but also be honest about the consequences of academic misconduct

One of the most simple and effective solutions to reduce academic misconduct is to create clear communication channels with your students about your policies and expectations. This can be done with synchronous and asynchronous discussions about Academic Integrity and AI, through in-class dialogue and/or providing a Forum in OWL where students can comment and ask questions during the course.

Students are often driven by curiosity when disruptive tools are introduced and if instructors haven’t made their expectations clear about their use, there are greater opportunities for an AI tool to be used in unwanted ways.

You can also talk to your students about the well-documented limitations of ChatGPT, such as:

• it commonly makes up references and creates false citations
• it is missing new knowledge on topics that occurred after the AI had been trained, and it can also “make up” facts that are simply not true
• it can reproduce biases and prejudices contained in its training materials
• it can be repetitive and unoriginal in its writing style. Instructors who are unaware that content is generated by ChatGPT sometimes score it lower than true original work for this reason

Knowing how fallible the program can be and the extra work it causes for revising should help persuade students not to employ these tools when original work is called for.

A useful approach to minimizing the effectiveness of generative AI in assignments is to incorporate the learning process into assessment rather than one final assessed product. Having students hand in outlines and multiple drafts of a product makes it difficult to utilize a program like ChatGPT that specializes in grammatically correct production and does not excel in innovative idea generation. You can ask student to include how and why they came up with their ideas, as well.

Also, by allotting marks throughout the learning process, students can complete smaller tasks in shorter time periods and are less likely to engage in academic integrity misconduct due to a looming high-stakes assessment.

As noted above in “Will Turnitin’s AI Content Detection Tool Conclusively Identify AI-Generated Content in Student Work?”, AI-generated content detection software is currently in its infancy and is not a valid or reliable tool for demonstrating evidence of academic integrity misconduct. This includes the service provided by Western’s Turnitin installation. If you do not want students to use technology such as ChatGPT in your classes, the current best approach remains (as with almost all instances related to academic integrity) to talk to your students, set expectations, and design activities and assessments that discourage their use.

Generative AI can have benefits to teaching and learning. It has been described as a great tool to get writing started, by providing a reasonably coherent body of text on a topic. This can be used for an examination of content organization, research that is missing, as well as allowing the practice of more advanced writing and editing skills.

These tools are also excellent at summarizing and paraphrasing so there can be much work done comparing student production with AI-generated content. These exercises can also focus on language difference as the same content is repurposed for multiple audiences and are effective at evaluating incorrect content generated by the AI or identifying the biases and gaps which have manifested in its use

Turnitin is a plagiarism detection tool that compares student-submitted work to its large collection of published and previously-submitted work. The software generates an originality report for each student submission, indicating how much (%) of the document appears to be plagiarized and includes links to the original materials. Instructors can choose to use Turnitin when setting up assignment submissions in OWL. For instructions on how to use Turnitin at Western, go to the OWL Documentation Site and type “Turnitin” into the search option. Additional resources related to this software can be found on the Turnitin.com website.

The answer sheets (Scantrons) used for most multiple-choice exams are processed by a program called Scan Exam II, which includes Answer Choice Match Analysis to assist with the investigation of cheating. The number of answer matches between any pair of exam papers can be compared with the expected number of answer matches. The program does not prove cheating took place, but it does alert the instructor to that possibility.

• Examples and details about the statistical criteria Scan Exam II uses.