Pedagogical Strategies to Promote Academic Integrity
As you'll see in the next part of this module, the technological approaches (protection) to preventing cheating come at considerable cost in terms of technology requirements, privacy, and literal costs for software access and licenses.
Design strategies (prevention) also have costs, though, particularly in time and effort: creating a community of integrity and devising, participating in, supporting, and evaluating authentic / alternative assessments can take a significant amount of time and intellectual labor. But the rewards are also potentially great, creating richer learning experiences for students and increasing retention.
Let's take a look at some of these design strategies.
Clearly and Explicitly Define Cheating
Share the academic integrity policy of UW along with those of your school and program, linking to full version(s) if you are synopsizing. Use explicit, active language. For example, see what the Milgard School of Business includes in their template.
Openly Discuss the Consequences of Cheating
In addition to sharing the practical, short-term consequences of cheating, convey to the student the long-term ramifications.
Increase Awareness of Academic Support Resources
The template provides links to resources for students in a few places, including the writing and quantitative labs, but emphasizing those most useful for your course—and reminding them about them along with assignment instructions, etc.—makes it more likely your students will use those resources instead of resorting to cheating.
Help Students Understand How to Study
Perhaps surprisingly, university students often do not know how to study, even at the graduate level! Sharing resources about how to study, how to engage with texts, etc. can help students prepare, reducing the perceived need to cheat. Having students prearrange some of their study by creating guides, flash cards, concept maps, or the like—or providing reading guides and the like—can help. In fact, many of the reading engagement strategies also serve this purpose.
Have Students Assert Their Academic Integrity
Ask students to actively assert their intent not to cheat in the course. This is the last item in the prep modules in the template. This should be paired with some kind of similar assertion, even in the form of a checkbox, with significant assignments.
Reinforce How Your Course Connects to the Future
Recall that cheating can be the result of not understanding the relevance or importance of an assignment. This matters at all levels, including the purpose of the course and how the student's performance in it could impact their future in their course of study, the discipline, or their working career.
Require In-Course References
Requiring students to explicitly reference or otherwise link to specific parts of the course, course materials, or previous assignments makes it more difficult to cheat by appropriating material from other sources.
Choose High-Stake Assignments Carefully
If poor performance in a single assignment or assessment can scuttle a student's chances at a satisfactory grade, they will be more tempted to cheat. There is a place for high-stakes assignments, but the choice to use them should be determined by the learning objectives rather than a mean of signalling importance.
Create a Safe Environment for Learning (Including Mistakes)
Limiting high-stakes assignments and assessments is part of a larger motif of creating a safe learning environment. Students are in your class to learn, not to already be accomplished: there should be room to make mistakes and to perform poorly with a reasonable chance to doing better and showing improvement. If a student feels the pressure to get it right the first time with no recourse if they don't, they will be more inclined to cheat.
Think Through Where Closed & Open Assessment Fit
Many assessments are "closed book" for little or no apparent reason. Traditional assessments, in particular, are often administered this way without much thought given as to why. If, in the real world, a student will routinely use resources, it might be that they should be able to do so at points in your course as well. Again, this isn't a recommendation not to have closed book assessments or high-stakes assignments, but to choose them carefully.
Use Scaffolded Assignments
A "scaffolded" assignment is one in which a larger assignment is broken into smaller pieces that focus on the things needed to complete a larger assignment or assessment. Such assignments are necessarily much more difficult to cheat by simply downloading a finished product or even having someone create that product.
The classic example is writing a paper. A scaffolded version of writing a paper might involve the following steps, each of which are submitted, though not all will necessarily be evaluated deeply: devise an idea/thesis, write a proposal, create an outline. perform a lit review, and create multiple drafts...all leading up to submitting the final paper (perhaps with copies of the references).
Create Assignments that Require Higher-Order Thinking
The more an assignment or assessment demands higher-order thinking (the further along Bloom's Taxonomy the thinking required resides), the more difficult it will be to cheat.
Use Authentic / Alternative Assessments
As we've shared earlier, authentic / alternative assessments are naturally resistant to cheating.
Require Student Reflection
Requiring students to reflect on their learning: how they pursued the assignment, what challenges they faced, the resources they used, the questions they still have, etc., add a layer to assignments that students will find harder to cheat.