Promoting Academic Integrity

Ensuring integrity in your classroom is best approached on three fronts.

The first step is conveying to students why academic integrity matters, to you, to them, and overall. Let your students know what you want them to personally learn, know, and be able to do by the end of the course, and how the coursework and assignments support those goals.

The second element involves educating the students about your expectations for the integrity of their work in that class. This includes a general statement about the Honor Code, along with expectations specific to your class and/or discipline. Outline expectations clearly in your syllabus and discuss them in class, ideally more than once.

The third part of ensuring integrity in the classroom involves actively preventing academic misconduct and confronting situations where you believe academic misconduct might have occurred. Below are tips that you might find helpful in creating and maintaining an environment of integrity in your classroom.

Setting Clear Expectations

Faculty are encouraged to include the following statement on their syllabus where they address Academic Integrity and the Honor Code:

“The Emory Undergraduate Academic Honor Code is in effect throughout the semester. The Honor Code applies to any action or inaction that fails to meet the communal expectations of academic integrity, including use of generative artificial intelligence. Students should strive to excel in their academic pursuits in a just way with honesty and fairness in mind and avoid all instances ofcheating, lying, plagiarizing, or engaging in other acts that violate the Honor Code. Such violations undermine both the individual pursuit of knowledge and the collective trust of the Emory community. Students who violate the Honor Code may be subject to failure of the course, a reportable record, suspension, permanent expulsion, or a combination of these and other sanctions.”

View the honor code

Highlight any policies that are specific to your class assignments. For example, the expectation of individual work on homework assignments, requirements involving the use of specific sources for information, etc.

Explicitly state your policy on generative artificial intelligence use for your class.

State how you intend to handle violations.

Talk about your expectations in your first few class sessions. Talk about “why”, not just “what”. For an excellent summary of talking points with students, see this article by David Callahan, author of The Cheating Culture.

Contact the Oxford Honor Council to invite a member to your class for a presentation on academic integrity.

If the course requires a research paper, incorporate a short lecture on how to do the research and where to seek help with questions in this area.

Remind students of your expectations for integrity prior to all assignments, tests, quizzes, papers, and projects. Research supports that timely reminders reduce academic misconduct (Vahid, Frank, et al, 2023).

Methods for Preventing and Discovering Cheating:

Have students write and sign the honor pledge at the BEGINNING of their assignment. Research suggests that students are much less likely to cheat if they are reminded of their obligation to be ethical just prior to completing an assignment.

Require students to submit topics for your approval, and then produce drafts prior to submission of the final paper. Don’t accept last-minute changes. Many faculty choose to keep the draft for comparative purposes with the final submission. This method not only prevents many forms of plagiarism and cheating, it also prevents procrastination – one of the primary reasons students cheat.

Use in class writing assignments to gauge student progress if appropriate to the material.

Carefully monitor the process of handing in or distributing graded materials to protect students from the theft of their work by others.

If you will be using Blue Books for an exam, have each student turn in an empty book the class prior to the exam. Redistribute the books randomly on the day of the exam.

Provide students with the scratch paper they need for the exam.

Have all students place their bookbags at the front of the classroom prior to handing out the exam.

Have all students turn off their cell phones and place them in their bags prior to handing out the exam.

Direct students to turn off smart watches as well as earphones and place them in their bags prior to handing out the exam.

Administer the exam in parts. Require each part be submitted with no chance for revision to permit bathroom breaks.

If possible, seat students in every other row.

Administer more than one version of the exam, even if it means that the pages or questions of the exam are just in a different order.

Number the exams that are handed out and require that they be returned.

Have your exams proctored at all times, and make sure to move around the room.

Use different versions of the exam if you allow students to take exams early or late.

Clearly mark the incorrect answers on a test using a mark that passes through the answer.

Make copies of or scan exam papers prior to handing them back to students. Let the class know that you will photocopy a random sample of the exams for your files prior to returning them to the class.

Watch for changes in students’ behavior, their placement in the testing environment, and their appearance.

Be aware of items that make it difficult to see the students’ face, such as hats or sunglasses.

Do not recycle tests from semester to semester, especially if you have handed back the answer sheet or a copy of the test paper.

If using problem sets that have a solution manual, note any errors in the solutions manual and pay attention to papers submitted with similar errors.

For additional information or resources concerning academic integrity in the classroom, please contact the Oxford Honor Council Administrator.

References:

Vahid, Frank, et al. “Impact of several low-effort cheating-reduction methods in a CS1 class.” Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1, 2 Mar. 2023, pp. 486–492, https://doi.org/10.1145/3545945.3569731.