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Academic integrity is not only about holding students to high standards and creating consistent expectations through course policies. More fundamentally, it’s about helping students find the value in facing learning challenges and rising to meet them. Academic integrity develops foundational skills for ethical growth, as well as skills for fair and responsible behavior in society and the workplace. Also, preserving academic integrity in higher education preserves the integrity of the degrees it issues.

Students share faculty concerns about academic integrity and social responsibility. An inventory conducted across 23 institutions found majorities of both students and campus professionals “agreed that personal and academic integrity should be a major focus of their institution” and “strongly agreed that developing competence in ethical and moral reasoning should be a major institutional focus” (O’Neil, 2013). Faculty and students are partners in the belief that academic integrity and social responsibility are important aspects of a well rounded education.

Setting the tone for your course helps clarify expectations early on and can help prevent academic misconduct. The key is a community-building approach that avoids an adversarial relationship with students. This can be tough, but the rewards are tremendous. Community building encourages students to persevere and take risks when they may otherwise have considered a shortcut. Students who understand the reasoning behind your methods are more likely to abide by your expectations and transfer them to future learning situations.

By aiming to understand where students’ motivations reside, we can turn a violation of academic integrity into a learning opportunity. Students live complex lives. Their reasons for making poor choices may not be simple, calculated, or even intentional.

So why do students cheat on tests, plagiarize writing, copy homework, etc.? In an interview, James Lang, the author of Cheating Lessons, noted that “cheating is an inappropriate response to a learning environment that’s not working for the student” (Golden, 2013). Understanding students’ motivations will help you know how to proceed when a violation occurs.

• They don’t find peers and faculty who value academic integrity. Students aware of peers cheating or faculty ignoring cheating are more likely to assume that cheating is necessary to succeed. Similarly, schools that have no honor code reported nearly twice as much cheating as those with honor codes (McCabe, 2005).
• They want a competitive edge. Students who focus on getting the grade they want, gaining entrance into a competitive program, or pleasing parents or mentors may choose a shortcut toward that goal. Conversely, students who focus on growth, improvement, and mastery are less likely to cheat (Lang, 2013).
• They haven’t been taught to accurately cite research. Many students enter college having never been adequately taught how to conduct research and incorporate sources into their writing. They may have a vague idea of what plagiarism is — but accurately paraphrasing, quoting, and summarizing borrowed information requires skills they may not have mastered, causing them to inadvertently commit plagiarism.
• They are ill equipped to face the challenges of college. Whether it’s poor time management, too many commitments, or family emergencies, students often find themselves with work due before they’re prepared to complete it with quality. To exacerbate the issue, many students are afraid to contact their instructors about these issues or ask for help until it’s too late.

As faculty, we need to collectively look in the mirror and realize we probably contribute to the cheating problem. Therefore we are at least partially responsible for fixing it. Faculty members are clearly a key to achieving academic integrity, because they are in the classrooms and dealing with students every day (McCabe et al., 2012, p. 144).

Turnitin is a PSU-supported platform that allows students and faculty to determine whether student work is original or borrowed, and whether plagiarism may have occurred. Turnitin alone cannot determine whether academic integrity has been violated, but it assists faculty and students in deciding whether a text meets the standards of documenting borrowed information.

While Turnitin is designed to detect plagiarism, it can also help students learn. With appropriate planning, you can give students ownership over their use of Turnitin, helping them improve their ability to incorporate borrowed information.

• Include a statement (such as this) about how you’ll use Turnitin in your syllabus so students know what to expect.
• Introduce Turnitin to your students as a way for them to improve, not as a policing tool. Demonstrate how it works.
• Build in enough time for multiple drafts. This will allow students to use Turnitin to detect potential plagiarism and make corrections.

If you suspect academic misconduct, your best resource is the Director of Conduct and Community Standards in the Dean of Student Life Office.

• It’s the only central program on campus that can track concerns, patterns of behavior, and incidents of academic misconduct.
• It’s the only office on campus that offers educational engagement opportunities for sanctions that foster accountability.
• It has knowledgeable staff experienced in academic integrity concerns and new or developing trends in academic misconduct.

You may be familiar with student learning outcomes, also sometimes called learning objectives or course goals. Your course may have preset outcomes already determined, or you might need to identify outcomes. In either case, you want to make sure you have a set of student learning outcomes that are accurate and reflect the purpose of the course. Good student learning outcomes are observable and measurable — so you can observe student work and measure whether it meets the goals of the course. Outcomes might address content knowledge, skills, or even dispositions that you intend students to acquire. For a guide to writing effective student learning outcomes, check out the OAI+ article on assessment methods.

Imagine that a large box arrives at your house. It’s full of parts to assemble but has no instructions and no pictures of the final object — so you are stuck trying to make sense of all the parts without understanding the end goal. This is how students often feel when they enter a course without student learning outcomes or clear goals.

Once you’ve identified the outcomes for your course, they form the foundation, blueprint, or roadmap that everyone in the course is working toward. As you design or revise your course, keep coming back to these outcomes to ensure your planned assessments, assignments, learning activities, and teaching strategies align with your intended learning outcomes.

Think back to that mysterious box that arrived at your house. What if the box had instructions, but they didn’t match the parts? What if parts were missing or the instructions skipped big steps?

This is analogous to what happens when assigned work doesn’t align with the course goals or when assessments don’t match what has been taught in the class. It’s difficult for students to understand why the work is necessary or relevant or how their assessments reflect what they are learning.

This article uses assessments and assignments interchangeably as ways to externalize student learning, to better observe and measure it.

Some assessments are intended to help you and students perceive how much progress you’ve all made toward meeting the course goals. Other assessments are meant to measure whether students are ready to move on to the next stage, whether that’s the next topic in your course or another course altogether. Not all assessments need to be graded. Some can be used as practice that helps you adjust your expectations and helps students know what to focus on as they progress through the course.

On assessments meant to serve as learning tools for future work, it’s often helpful to give students opportunities for peer review, self-reflection, and suggestions rather than a letter or number grade. Research shows that grades are often demotivating for students and can be confusing when students try to improve their grade in future assignments. While we often look at grades as inevitable and ubiquitous, they are relatively new as a standard practice in higher education (Schinske & Tanner, 2014).

When asking students to complete large assessments such as term papers, presentations, group projects, lab experiments, final exams, or research studies, it’s helpful to break these assignments into smaller tasks that “scaffold” the work and support the final product.

Another important aspect of scaffolding is ensuring continuity between synchronous and asynchronous aspects of the class. For example, if students are assigned readings and discussions to complete on their own time, class time should relate to those readings and discussions. Maybe that means scheduling time for Q&A about the asynchronous work before moving on to new material, or providing the new material in advance of the class session so students are ready to discuss it in real time.

One of the most common mistakes in course design is assuming the material is the course. Rather, the material is merely one tool of the course. The learning experiences, relationships, and teaching strategies you plan should align with your course goals and students needs. “Those who do the work do the learning” (Doyle, 2011) — so the more students have opportunities to interact with the course materials, their peers, and you, the better. When considering what activities to design for your course, ask yourself what students can do to connect with the course skills, dispositions, and concepts.

Whether you use feedback from last term’s students or suggestions from this term’s students, inviting your students to give design input will do a lot to help the course run smoothly.

• • Student input encourages student motivation, participation, and agency.
  • Course co-creation helps to meet student needs by encouraging a diversity of ideas and choices.

Even before you meet your students, it’s important to think about how you can engage with them, give them feedback, and check in with them regularly. Building community and a sense of instructor presence goes a long way in helping students feel supported and part of a learning community.

Despite all the planning you’ve done, each time you teach a course you and your students will have different needs and outcomes. It can be helpful to keep a running log of changes you’d like to make or strategies that worked well. Then when you prepare to teach the course again, you have an idea of where to focus your efforts. An OAI course consultation or a student-centered course review can also give you feedback and ideas to continue refining your course.