The NIU community embraces the principle that “Good academic work must be based on honesty. The attempt of any student to present as his or her own work that which he or she has not produced is regarded by the faculty and administration as a serious offense.” (1) Learning the rules of legitimacy in academic work is part of college education so the topic of cheating and plagiarism should be embraced as part of ongoing discussion among students and faculty Instructors should remind students of this obligation throughout their courses.
Include a statement about cheating and plagiarism in your syllabus. Remind students of upholding NIU's academic integrity standards as an obligation of participating in our learning community (see sample syllabus statement). Students can learn more about plagiarism and take the NIU academic integrity tutorial.
Reduce confusion about cheating and plagiarism by setting expectations for collaboration, guidelines for citation, and the use of electronic sources for every assessment. It may be necessary to define what kinds of programs are considered cheating for your discipline (for example, online translators in language courses). You can ask students to sign a pledge sheet in a written exam or remind them of academic integrity before exams begin online.
Provide ongoing feedback to reduce the temptation to cheat. Students may be tempted to cheat when they don’t know how to approach a task. Requiring students to turn in smaller chunks of a paper or project for feedback and a grade ahead of the final deadline can lessen the risk of cheating. Having multiple milestones on larger assessments reduces the stress of finishing a paper at the last minute or cramming for a final exam.
Ask questions that have no single right answer. The most direct approach to reduce cheating is to design open-ended assessment items. When writing test or quiz questions ask yourself: could this answer be easily discovered online? If so, rewrite your question to elicit more critical thinking from your student. Critical thinking questions can take the form of any question type. For example, a real-world case study scenario can gauge higher-order thinking more effectively than multiple choice responses.
Open-ended assessments can take the form of case studies, projects, essays, podcasts, interviews, or “explain your work” problem sets. Students can provide examples of course concepts in a novel way. They can record themselves explaining the idea to someone else or make a mind map of related events or ideas. They can present their solutions to real-world scenarios as a poster or a podcast. If you choose to conduct an exam, designing questions that ask students to decide which concepts or equations to apply in a scenario, rather than testing recall, may make the most sense for many courses.
Minimize opportunities for cheating in tests and quizzes. If you offer quizzes or tests in your course there are several steps that you can take to reduce cheating, plagiarism, or other academic integrity violations:
Flexible Teaching guides were developed by Duke Learning Innovation and adapted for NIU by the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning. They are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
Are you planning to deliver a hybrid course? Learn more tips for designing and delivering a hybrid class.
Guide to Hybrid Course Delivery
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