Students’ perceptions of academic integrity will vary, so make your expectations consistent and clear.
Develop a course protocol document that appeals to students’ virtues, principles, and reasoning. This could be done collaboratively with input from the students themselves. Ask them questions such as “What constitutes academic honesty versus dishonesty?”, “What can we, as a learning community, do to prevent dishonesty activity in our course?” Use Conestoga’s Academic Integrity website or relevant policies and procedures to guide this activity.
A culture of integrity is best achieved through modelling and mentorship.
As faculty, we must assess our own practices and resources (slides, handouts, postings, publications, etc.) to ensure we’re appropriately acknowledging and citing the work of others. When we model scholarly behaviour, we encourage students to follow our lead.
Academic Integrity is a shared responsibility.
Refer students to key supports. Try instituting a “three-before-me” routine wherein students identify three steps they will take to get feedback prior to submission. Feedback sources could include visiting the Library Services for research, writing and citing support.
Students are more likely to cheat when they’re anxious or worried.
Provide the scaffolding needed to make course outcomes achievable, and inspire student autonomy by offering choice over the content and/or process and/or product that they are assigned.
Instances of academic dishonesty shouldn’t be ignored.
Even with all your efforts at prevention, some students might cheat. All cases of academic integrity violation should be filed using the Academic Offences tab in the Employee Portal.
Although deferred deadlines are not always ideal or feasible, sometimes the only thing a student needs to produce honest and authentic work is a little more time.
Special thanks to the Academic Integrity Council of Ontario (AICO) for developing the resource.
At Conestoga, students are discouraged from using generative artificial intelligence tools unless provided clear instructions by their faculty. Here is an educational video (1:11) you can share with your students on Conestoga' AI Guidelines:
Consider Creating a Generic Turnitin Assignment Folder for students to submit any/all of their assignments to check their work.
IMPORTANT: If you create a Generic Assignment Folder, you must remember to change the Submission Settings (find in More Options - Optional Settings). See below how to get to this point.
Under the heading “Submit papers to” select Do not store the submitted papers.
The Academic Integrity Office strongly recommends that students have access to their Turnitin Similarity Scores before the due date. Turnitin should be used as an educational tool for both the faculty and the student. Students can use their Turnitin Similarity Score as one editing tool to check their citing, referencing and paraphrasing before submitting their final version.
Here is a video (7:30) you can share with your students on how they can use Turnitin as an editing tool: