Tip: Dealing With Cheating & Plagiarism
Create opportunities for students to be motivated & engaged while reducing the opportunities & pressures that might encourage students to take short-cuts.
Last summer I shared some resources about technology and academic integrity, and some concerns about how the stresses of pandemic-interrupted education and the freedom of newly online/remote courses might combine to create an environment where students feel pushed to find shortcuts when completing assignments. I think the suggestions I shared then are still good ones (lower time pressure, lower due-date pressure, lower grade anxiety, and lower communication anxiety).
My philosophy about student work is to create many opportunities for them to be motivated to do their own work and engage with the course assignments and reduce (as much as possible) both the opportunities to cheat and the pressures that might encourage students to take short-cuts in their work. It is easier and less stressful, I find, to design course assignments in a way that makes cheating both very difficult to do, and very ineffective at actually improving the student’s overall grade. If cheating on an assignment is both time-consuming to do and results in only small differences to the final grade, it seems logical that students will be less motivated to cheat: it’s a lot of work for minimal reward. It’s when cheating is relatively easy to do with little risk of getting caught, and when the result is potentially a significant reward in terms of either time saved or grade improvement (or both), that the motivation to cheat seems to be strongest.
I want to encourage original work from the start…
The most successful method I’ve found for encouraging students to do the work of developing their own papers and projects is to break the assignment into steps and assign point values for each piece. Students are more tempted to cheat when there are a small number of high-stakes assignments for which there is little required preparation work to help them learn how to do the assignment. Breaking the assignment into smaller pieces, requiring that students complete the preparatory work before moving forward to larger components, and requiring that students show evidence of revision based on your feedback, are all steps that make plagiarizing an assignment more difficult.
Despite our best efforts, there will be cases where you suspect a student has submitted an assignment that isn’t their own work. Some cases of cheating or plagiarism are more straightforward. Perhaps the plagiarism checking software you use has flagged a student’s paper - this isn’t foolproof, but it’s certainly a place to start a conversation with the student. But often, it’s not a very clearcut situation of cheating or plagiarism.
I suspect plagiarism, but there’s no “evidence”…
Although I have never had a formal procedure outlined, like in this “affirmation meeting” example, there have been semesters where upon receipt of the final papers I’ve added a short response question to an in-class quiz or exam asking students to summarize their own research. The idea was that students who spent the semester working on their research, writing the paper, and then condensing the paper into a poster to share with the class, would easily be able to summarize what they learned in response to the prompt. Students who did not do their own work would find it difficult to summarize a paper they hadn’t done the research for or written themselves.
For more reading…
Univ. of Arkansas Teaching Innovation and Pedagogical Support has a page addressing academic honesty
Columbia Univ. Center for Teaching and Learning offers some resources for promoting academic integrity
Iowa State’s Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching has an extensive list of articles and websites on its achieving academic integrity page.