19 Academic Integrity
Academic integrity speaks to the student’s and instructor’s responsibilities for scholarly honesty in all modalities of learning, including online learning. The University’s Office for Community Standards has developed guidelines for “Promoting Academic Integrity in your Course” including:
- Define the appropriate use of resources at the beginning of the course. Restate these expectations as exams and assignments come due.
- Include the recommended syllabus statement regarding scholastic dishonesty.
- Explicitly state expectations for collaboration and group work.
- Change exams routinely and reorder exam questions.
- Proctor exams carefully and closely monitor makeup test arrangements. (The University offers two options for online exam proctoring: Proctorio and ProctorU; see below)
- Discuss the importance of academic integrity with students.
For additional information about academic integrity at the University, see “Academic Integrity Resources for Instructors”
Honor Statements
Consider adding honor statements at the beginning of the quiz or exam or in their syllabus. An example of an honor statement from the University of Minnesota’s College of Pharmacy:
Each student is bound by the College of Pharmacy Honor Code, which states, ‘Academic misconduct’ is any unauthorized act which may give a student an unfair advantage over other students, including but not limited to: falsification, plagiarism, misuse of test materials, receiving unauthorized assistance and giving unauthorized assistance.
Plagiarism Detection
Turnitin is the centrally licensed plagiarism detection tool for the University, and it is integrated with Canvas. It creates a similarity score that is generated by comparing submitted work to other published material that it has in its databases, giving you an idea of how much material a student may have cited or borrowed from other sources.
Turnitin may be integrated with writing assignments at the point that students submit to Canvas. Note there is an option in Turnitin which stores submitted writing in a national database (in order to compare writing with other published work). You can turn this option on or off. If it is off, student writing is not stored by the vendor. If you choose to leave this option on, let students know their data will be stored by Turnitin. Storing student papers in Turnitin can cause issues if they plan to publish their papers. When publishers do a search on their papers, the Turnitin database may reference the student assignment as a publication. Students have objected to this setting at other universities, and we recommend you turn it off if you have any concerns.
Remote Proctoring
Remote proctoring helps ensure exam integrity when students are taking online exams. For online proctoring tool options, see OIT’s Exam security web page.
This same page also includes information on various topics that support online exam security such as:
- Requiring students to agree to an honor statement