Northern Illinois University
Academic Integrity Tutorials

How to use this tutorial

The objectives of this tutorial are to:

• increase users' awareness of cheating and plagiarism, and their consequences,
• offer strategies to help students avoid academic dishonesty situations and protect themselves,
• provide faculty with an educational resource to supplement their classroom discussions on academic dishonesty issues.

For the tutorial to work properly, pop-up blockers should be disabled and other software running on the local computer should not interfere with the tutorial.

Note: It is strongly recommended that you complete this tutorial on a laptop or desktop computer. Mobile devices commonly have privacy settings that block cookies, which will prevent you from receiving your certificate of completion. Cookies must be enabled in the user's browser in order for the tutorial to save the user's progress, and for the certificate to be printed. No personal information is permanently saved on the tutorial site.

Faculty Tutorial

This tutorial is intended for self-paced review by faculty in any discipline. It is recommended that faculty review the content sections in the order they are presented and complete the activities included with each section. The content and activities of this tutorial have been designed to be accessible to users’ with disabilities.

Faculty can use the tutorial to guide the design of their course and instructional activities effectively and prepare themselves better to deal with academic dishonesty incidents. The tutorial should not be considered as a comprehensive resource on academic integrity. The tutorial is intended only to promote academic integrity and not to address university policies and procedures on academic dishonesty or discuss writing strategies. Faculty are recommended to cover university policies and procedures in their course syllabi, discuss good writing strategies in the classroom, and refer students to appropriate resources on campus and on the Web for more information

Student Tutorial

This tutorial is intended for self-paced learning by students in all disciplines. It is recommended that students review the content sections in the order they are presented and complete the activities included with each section in one session.

The content and activities of this tutorial have been designed to be accessible to users with disabilities. Students with particular disabilities that prevent them from reviewing the tutorial or completing the quizzes are encouraged to contact their instructors for reasonable accommodations.

Instructors can use the tutorial as part of their classroom discussions on academic integrity and encourage students to review the content and complete the activities as part of a course activity. But instructors are recommended to review the tutorial fully and complete the quizzes before assigning the tutorial as a course activity to students so instructors can make sure the tutorial works properly on local computers and browsers.

The tutorial should neither be considered a comprehensive resource on academic integrity, nor should it be used to test students on academic integrity. The Certificate of Completion that students can print after completing the tutorial successfully is only a record of their completion, and it cannot authenticate individual students actually reviewing the content and completing the quizzes successfully.

It should be emphasized here that the tutorial is intended only to promote academic integrity, and not to discuss university policies and procedures on academic dishonesty or discuss writing strategies. Faculty are recommended to cover university policies and procedures in their course syllabi, discuss good writing strategies in the classroom, and refer students to appropriate resources on campus and on the web for more information.

Quizzes

Quizzes consist of several questions carefully designed to help you self-assess your comprehension of the information presented in each section. Each question in a quiz is of multiple-choice format. Read each question carefully, and click on the button next to your response that is based on the information covered on the topic in the module. Each correct or incorrect response will result in appropriate feedback immediately at the bottom of the screen.

Every time you take a quiz, the questions will be presented in a new, random order. You can retake an incorrectly answered question until you have answered it correctly. Questions cannot be skipped. All questions for a given quiz must be answered correctly for that quiz to be marked as complete. This website records quiz completion in the browser used to take the tutorial; no personal or quiz completion data is sent to anyone else. If you change computers or browsers, all progress will be lost.

To begin a quiz, click on the "Start Quiz" button at the end of a section. After you have taken the quizzes for all the topics, the tutorial will display the "Get Your Certificate" button. Click on the button to print your certificate of completion.

Certificate of Completion

The Certificate of Completion is a record of completing all of the tutorial's quizzes successfully. The certificate is not a license or certification on academic integrity issues. Quizzes may be started and stopped and returned to later. Note: cookies must be enabled in the user's browser in order for the tutorial to save progress, and for the certificate to be printed.

After all of the quizzes in the tutorial have been completed successfully, a button titled "Get Your Certificate" will be displayed for users to click on, to obtain the Certificate of Completion. They can then enter their name, along with department or institution name, to be displayed on the certificate. After clicking the Submit button, the website will display the certificate, which can then be printed. The certificate will include date of completion.

Acknowledgments

The project team would like to express its sincere gratitude to the Committee for the Improvement of Undergraduate Education at Northern Illinois University for its partial funding of this effort through the "Project for Improvement of Undergraduate Education" grant awarded in 2005 to Murali Krishnamurthi, Associate Professor, Department of Industrial Engineering. Substantial additional funding was contributed to this project by the Faculty Development and Instructional Design Center at Northern Illinois University.

The project team would like to acknowledge the contributions of the staff of the Faculty Development and Instructional Center, Office of the Ombudsman, Writing Center, and Department of English at Northern Illinois University for this effort. The Certificate of Completion was designed by the Office of Publications.

Developers

The information presented in this module was organized by the following individuals at Northern Illinois University

• Murali Krishnamurthi, professor, Department of Industrial Engineering; vice provost for faculty affairs
• Jason Rhode, assistant professor, Department of Educational Technology, Research and Assessment; director, Faculty Development and Instructional Design Center
• Melina Bar, University Writing Center
• Lynda Nance, University Writing Center
• Tim Griffin, Office of the Ombudsperson

The following graduate assistants at the Faculty Development and Instructional Design Center contributed to the web design, development and implementation of the tutorial:

• Sathappan Santhanam
• Vijay Bhaskar Reddy Kancharla
• Ratna Jijjavarapu
• Pu (Lucia) Wang
• Sagar Sudhakar
• Allenisia Hamilton
• Xiaoshu Zhou

Reviewers

This collaborative effort benefited from the generosity of the following faculty and staff at Northern Illinois University who volunteered their time to review the draft content and activities and offer their feedback on the module. This effort would not have been possible without their support.

• Byron Anderson, University Libraries
• Melina Bar, University Writing Center
• Karen Carrier, Department of Literacy Education
• Michael Day, Department of English
• Ellen Franklin, Department of English
• Tim Griffin, Office of the Ombudsperson
• Sharon Hekman, Department of English
• Judith Hertz, School of Nursing
• Lynda Nance, University Writing Center
• Cassandra Peterson, Department of English

Disclaimer

The developers of this Web site acknowledge that the information presented in this tutorial was compiled from several sources including existing literature, online resources and contributions of faculty, staff, and students at Northern Illinois University. The developers do not claim the content presented in the tutorial as their own, but have included adequate links and references wherever possible. If appropriate credit has not been assigned to any information presented in the tutorial, please inform the developers at facdev@niu.edu so that the necessary corrections can be made and appropriate credit can be given where necessary.

This tutorial is not intended to advocate any particular viewpoint and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Faculty Development and Instructional Design Center or Northern Illinois University. Users are requested to use the tutorial for educational purposes only.