Academic Integrity Resources for Faculty

It is important to set expectations at the start of the semester for what behaviors are appropriate for your class. Many cases of academic misconduct occur because students are not sure what they are and are not allowed to do in your class. Here are some recommendations to address this issue.

• Discuss your expectations around exams, assignments, and papers at the start of the semester.
• Include a section on academic integrity on your syllabus that sets out your expectations. Relevant language can be found on the Your Syllabus at UT Austin
• One great suggestion from Kristin Harvey is to set up a brief quiz in Canvas at the start of the semester with scenarios and examples of appropriate and inappropriate behavior. In her classes, students cannot access any of the course materials until they have passed the quiz. Information about setting up a quiz like this can be found here.
• LAITS also has a set of pre-course activities for their online classes for educating students about academic integrity, which you can find here.
• LAITS has developed an academic integrity agreement that students in their online classes must sign, which you can find here.
• For classes that involve academic writing, it is also useful to help students understand plagiarism. The libraries teamed up with George Schorn to put together an excellent video that gives students useful information about plagiarism and how to avoid it. Here’s a link to the video.
• If you plan to use a tool like TurnItIn as part of your class, Fernanda Leite from Engineering recommends letting students know what criterion you are going to use (such as a similarity score less than 20%) and ask students to upload their report before the deadline so that they can check the score in advance rather than finding out later that there was a problem. If you do plan on using plagiarism detection software, you should be aware of some of the limitations of these tools that the Faculty Writing Committee has developed. That can be found here.

There are costs and benefits to any action. In the moment, students will consider the benefits of an action. That is also true for academic misconduct. Consequently, it is valuable to lower the costs for desirable behavior and increase the costs of undesirable behavior.

• Having students sign an integrity agreement to acknowledge their understanding of appropriate and inappropriate behavior increases the cost of academic misconduct by forcing students to explicitly violate an agreement with you, as opposed to engaging in a behavior that has not been explicitly forbidden.
• Consider minimizing the number of high-stakes exams (particularly in online classes). While the online environment can make it easy for students to engage in academic misconduct, when there are frequent low-stakes assessments, the benefit to academic misconduct is also low.
• Consider designing exams that are open book/open note.
• Change exam questions every semester. Course information sharing websites are likely to have copies of your exam soon after it is given.

Another factor that promotes academic misconduct is that many classes are not clear about the role that assessments and assignments play in the learning process. There is good evidence that studying for exams and answering questions increases learning in the class. In addition, students are often unsure about exactly what they are supposed to be learning in a course and how the assessments and assignments relate to those learning outcomes.

To address this issue, the Academic Affairs team in the Provost’s Office has launched the Course Clarity Project. The ultimate aim of this project is for each course to have about 10 clearly stated learning outcomes that identify the central knowledge and skills students will acquire in the class. Learning objectives are a required element of a course syllabus, and each assignment and assessment can then be related back to those core learning outcomes. Finally, the grading rubrics for assignments can tie performance back to those learning outcomes. A benefit to structuring a class in this way is that it makes the assignments and assessments central to the purpose of the class and clarifies that when students do not turn in their own work, they are not getting feedback about the degree to which they have achieved the desired goals of the class.

The Course Clarity Project website has simple exercises that you can complete in under two hours that will walk you through the process of developing learning outcomes for your classes.