M2: Encouraging academic integrity in online assessments

Encouraging your students to behave with integrity when completing online assessments poses special challenges. When teaching your course, it’s important you educate your students on academic responsibilities and build a culture of integrity in the online classroom. Refer to UBC's Academic Integrity website for information and resources for both faculty and students to learn about academic integrity, understand its role and what happens when it is breached. 

You can help educate your students about UBC's policies on academic integrity and misconduct 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. You can do this in the course syllabus or in your welcome to the course. Consider including links to the Learning Commons: Academic Integrity website.
  • 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.
  • Encourage students to contact you if they have challenges with deadlines or technology rather than resorting to cheating.

Use Alternatives to Online Exams

Alternatives to in-person exams let students demonstrate their learning without traditional invigilation. Students can benefit from removing the additional stress and privacy concerns that may come with being monitored on camera, especially when taking an exam at home.

Open-book exam with integrity pledge: Restructure your questions knowing that students will have access to course materials and the Internet. Set up an exam in Canvas. As the first question, ask students to agree to an integrity pledge. You can use example language developed by UBC’s Faculty of Science:

“I hereby pledge that I have read and will abide by the rules, regulations, and expectations set out in the Academic Calendar, with particular attention paid to the: Student Declaration & Responsibility, Academic Honesty & Standards, Student Conduct During Examinations, and any special rules for conduct as set out by the examiner. Additionally, I affirm that I will not give or receive any unauthorized help on this examination and that all work will be my own.”

Closed-book exam with integrity pledge and timing gates: Restructure your exam into smaller subsets of questions, creating a number of “mini-exams” in Canvas. Place time constraints so only one mini-exam is open at a time. This approach lets you apply a variation on time pressure to reduce the feasibility of using outside resources. As the first question, ask students to agree to an integrity pledge (see example language above) as well as to not use any outside resources. 

Alternative learning activity: Consider your most important learning objectives for the course and how else students might demonstrate their mastery. Examples might include the following:

  • Assignments submitted online like case studies, essays, concept maps, annotated bibliographies, videos, portfolios, etc.
  • Presentations given to you or the whole class online
  • Discussions with peers on discussion boards

Oral exams: If your class size is manageable and your course context allows, construct a shorter oral exam. Set up an online time with each individual student to meet privately to conduct the exam.

Refer to UBC’s alternatives to in-person exams guide for more information.

Invigilate Online Exams 

You can invigilate online exams with the ​video/audio web-conferencing and collaboration tool Zoom. You and your team can continuously or periodically monitor the live stream of all students' webcams using breakout rooms and be available to answer questions. You can also ask to see students' individual screens and photo identification. 

Refer to the Zoom Instructor Guide for instructions on how to schedule an invigilated exam with Zoom and run an invigilated exam with Zoom.