3.7 Encouraging academic integrity in online assessments

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What can you do as an instructor to encourage your students to behave with integrity when completing online assessments? The online environment poses special challenges, but many of these challenges can be overcome through purposeful design. There is no silver bullet to resolve all concerns about academic integrity. It requires a multi-strategy approach including educating students on academic responsibilities and building a culture of integrity in your course. Start by trusting your students – if they have chosen to study in summer and fall 2020, they likely genuinely want to learn.

Educate students about academic integrity

Students may be aware of UBC's policies on academic integrity and misconduct (Vancouver and Okanagan) yet still not fully understand what academic integrity means and why it’s important. You can help educate students about this concept by integrating the following recommendations into your course and practice: 

  • Explain why adhering to the principles of academic integrity are important in your field/discipline. Introduce this early on in the course, perhaps in the “Start Here” information described in Module 2. Consider including links to the Learning Commons: Academic Integrity website.

  • Introduce students to (and remind them of these throughout the term) the skills they need to cite appropriately from various sources. Provide links to UBC guidelines for the citation style you expect students to follow (APA [pdf], MLA [pdf], and Chicago [pdf]).

  • Make expectations clear to students on all assessments. Be explicit and include a personal message (e.g. “I expect all students will complete this quiz without consulting...”) at the start of each assessment. 

  • Keep the lines of communication open and make it easy for students to approach you if they have challenges with deadlines or technology rather than resorting to cheating.


Design your assessments to encourage academic integrity

There are many practices you can employ to encourage academic integrity while helping students better understand why it is important. One easy technique is to set an example through your own work by ensuring all of your teaching materials properly acknowledge sources.

Assignments, papers or projects

  • Have students apply personal experience when answering questions, or require that answers relate to something personal in the student’s life.
  • Focus on analysis and the synthesis of an idea, rather than on simply reporting facts.
  • Require students to select their topic early in the term so they have adequate time to complete the assignment.
  • Divide large assignments into smaller components with due dates spread across the term so students can’t use papers from paper mills.
  • Require students to create annotated bibliographies to show evidence of research and familiarity with sources.
  • Provide feedback on drafts of student work.
  • Require the incorporation of unique resources (e.g., current newspapers).
  • Use Collaborate Ultra, Zoom or other web conferencing tools to do some oral testing to have students “defend” their work to make sure that they formulated arguments on their own.

Quizzes and exams

  • Change assessment questions regularly. Provide past assessments to students as study materials.
  • Include self-reflection and critical thinking questions.
  • Create banks of questions so students don’t all receive the same questions.
  • Design your assessment so questions are presented in random order.
  • Scramble answers on multiple choice questions. This works well as long as there is no choice for the questions that is “all of the above”.
  • Consider an open book exam with an integrity pledge at the beginning, or a closed book exam with an integrity pledge and timing gates. 
  • Keep the timeframe for having access to the test reasonable, but short. If you have students for whom the timeframe would be overnight, consider developing a second assessment and assigning those students to an alternative timeframe.
  • If you decide to use online proctoring, be sure to explore the options and considerations thoroughly. 

Some content adapted from: Encouraging Academic Integrity Online. Centre for Teaching Excellence, University of Waterloo. Links to an external site.  (under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license)