Teaching and Learning Resources

Academic Integrity

What is Academic Integrity?
What Motivates Cheating?
Creating a Culture of Learning
- Plagiarism Detection Tools
Academic Honour Codes
References

What is Academic Integrity?

At the University of Windsor, academic integrity is defined as “centering your academic journey around the core values of honesty, respect, fairness, and responsibility.”* In the University of Windsor Student Code of Conduct, integrity is said to be the foundation of community, and that “[students] are expected to practice personal and academic integrity, to take responsibility for their own personal and academic commitments, and to contribute to the University community to gain fair, cooperative and honest inquiry and learning.” (University of Windsor, Board/Senate Policy on Student Code of Conduct).

Additional Resources

University of Windsor Academic Integrity Page
On Academic Integrity (Arbex, Kustra, Skene)

What Motivates Cheating?

A common concern about assignments that are not completed in a proctored setting is the possibility that students will cheat. Research into student motives for cheating, however, indicates that the key reasons students resort to plagiarism and other forms of cheating are not connected to the degree of oversight, but are related to pressure, work overload, lack of confidence in their ability to complete assignments successfully, or cultural differences in views of citation and authority.

Engagement

Lack of interest in the assignment
Habitual laziness
Lack of ethics / don't see anything wrong

Culture

Ease of access to usable resources
"Everyone else is doing it"
Lack of follow up or penalty for breaches

Skill

Unfamiliarity with task and expectations
Confusion about disciplinary conventions
Misunderstanding of roles in group work

Pressure

Parental pressure to do well
Compete with peers (for scholarships, etc.)
Overwhelmed by workload

Table 1: Most common reasons for student cheating (Christensen Hughes & McCabe, 2006; Howard & Jamieson, 2019; McCabe, 2001; McCabe, Trevino, and Butterfield, 2005; Owunwanne et al., 2010; Willen, 2004)

Creating a Culture of Learning

To create a culture of learning, and promote academic integrity, it is helpful to directly counter the pressures, culture, and other challenges noted above that can motivate cheating in your course design and classroom culture. Some general strategies are listed below. For more details about creating effective assessments, please visit our page on Assessment Design.

Emphasize Whole Person Learning

Practice decolonization techniques to define academic integrity in positive terms emphasizing a holistic view, relationality, and interconnected truth seeking (Poitras Pratt & Gladue, 2022).
Acknowledge the many variables and impacts on successful learning, and work with students to build a flexible, inclusive classroom community.

Reduce Pressure

Emphasize process, include low stakes and scaffolded assignments with feedback to help students do well.
Ensure workload is relevant to course, reduce busy work and plan for distributed workload over the term.
Emphasize learning opportunities over grades.

Support Skill Development

Ensure assignments are relevant and expectations clear: Research indicates that students are most likely to resort to plagiarism when they do not understand what it is they are supposed to do. When they can see the value of the exercise to their future courses or careers and thoroughly understand the tasks they are expected to complete, they are much more likely to do the work themselves.
Have clear descriptions of expectations in syllabi and assignment prompts.
Model for students effective balancing of relying on other sources and interrogating those sources.
Remember that disciplines vary in views about collaborative work, use of quotation vs summary, citation strategies and so on.
Consider the ways that students might employ tools such as GenAI in their learning, and the degree to which you wish to allow students to use these tools – and to promote literacy about the affordances and limits of these tools.

Consider Context

Be candid about the value of academic integrity, and the role it plays in the academy. Explain to students why academic integrity is important and provide resources to help ensure students know how to cite properly. You might also consider Academic Honour Codes, where you ask each student to provide an affirmation that their work is their own on the cover page of assignments or respond to a question affirming their identity when taking a test. (Please see below for some sample wording.) These measures do not guarantee that students will be telling the truth, but they do provide additional impetus to act with integrity.
Create assignments that are unique, targeted to your specific course, require higher order critical thinking and are situated within specific contexts.
Design assignments with collaboration in mind, to encourage consultation of resources and build habits of consultation and scholarly inquiry – and acknowledgement of sources.
Find opportunities to incorporate in-person components to assessment, where student individual knowledge will be required (such as presentations, peer review, group process assessment, in-lab assignments).
Follow up on suspected plagiarism; include a focus on education, not just punishment and deterrence.

Engage Students

Involve students in building a scholarly community and self-directed learning
Design assignments with intriguing problems or clear relevance to student interests. Assessments that require originality, synthesis of specific materials, and are directed to specific problems and purposes are much more difficult to plagiarize than those that ask only for memorization or definitions.
Design assessments to include a clear purpose, audience, format, and task. Specific details not only emphasize the relevance of the assignment but are also much more difficult to find ready-made.
Create prompts that involve specific, relevant details that must be incorporated into the analysis and outputs.
Provide variety in assessment type or options for students to pick from, both to give students a chance to play to their strengths and to spark their curiosity and creativity.
Encourage (and include in rubrics) responses that incorporate details from classroom readings and discussions.
Provide feedback that engages with students as researchers and authors, focusing on the academic conversation, rather than detail.

Plagiarism Detection Tools

Similarity checking/plagiarism detection software is available to help determine the originality of student submissions. Turnitin can be associated with Assignments in Brightspace. When using these tools, however, it is important to be aware of their affordances and limits: Using Plagiarism Detection Software (Skene))

Note that the development of GenAI also complicates the ability to use software to detect cheating. While tools such as Turnitin and other detection tools are increasingly attempting to detect text written by GenAI, they are not good at distinguishing human from virtually written text. False positive and false negative rates are substantial – and the better the detectors get, the better the tools at evading them. These tools are not recommended.

Academic Honour Codes

Academic Honour Codes can mitigate academic dishonesty by enlisting student support in the creation and maintenance of a culture of academic integrity. Research indicates that where honour codes are employed, students are more likely to see themselves as part of a community founded on trust, mutual recognition and support (McCabe, Trevino, & Butterfield, 2001). Because they value the privileges that arise from this type of community over a culture where compliance to rules is enforced only through punishment, they are less likely to succumb to the temptations to cheat.

An academic integrity code may be as simple as having students attach a verification that an assignment or test that they are submitting is their original work, or it may be used in the context of an overall course, or across the institution. The statements below provide some sample wording that you might use. Whichever you choose, ensure students sign and date the statements - or if online, indicate their agreement by checking a box or clicking a button.

Sample wording for individual assignments or tests:
I, _____________________, verify that the submitted work is my own and adheres to all my Academic Rights and Responsibilities as outlined in the Student Code of Conduct.