Academic Integrity at Seattle University
Seattle University asserts that academic honesty and integrity are important values in the educational process.
Seattle University asserts that academic honesty and integrity are important values in the educational process. Academic dishonesty in any form is a serious offense against the academic community. Acts of academic dishonesty or fraud will be addressed according to the Academic Integrity (2011-03).
Cite Your Sources
Seattle University's Lemieux Library has a helpful resource discussing how and why to cite your sources and provides links to a few resources on how to avoid plagiarism.
Academic Integrity Tutorial
Formerly accessible through SUOnline, the Academic Integrity Tutorial is a learning aid to help you understand the “dos and don'ts” of academic life. There are a variety of questions and answers with explanations to help you understand academic best practices.
If you would like to take the Academic Integrity Tutorial, please feel free to simply take the tutorial by clicking the button below.
Why Do Students Cheat?
In order to better address issues of academic integrity it helps to understand the reasons students turn to cheating in the first place. The reasons are, like our students, varied and diverse:
- They are embarrassed or anxious about asking for help from the instructor.
- They may not understand the explicit link between a given task and their mastery of the subject (feels like busy work, doesn’t feel like it has real-world relevance). In other words, students may not be able to relate to the classroom work in a meaningful way.
- There is a perceived lack of consequence (e.g. if my best friend cheated on his exams and still got a great job after graduating, why shouldn’t I?).
- They feel as if they are in competition with their peers and want to seize every opportunity for advantage that they can.
- Cultural reasons. Academic honesty is part of the culture of education and over the course of a student’s education, that culture becomes ingrained. Students who did their schooling under different cultural norms—international students, for example—may have a different understanding of what constitutes academic honesty and cheating.
- Difficulty balancing class workloads with job, family, or other commitments.
What Can Faculty Do?
Talk to your students
Foster openness between yourself and your students. When a student is struggling with a task you’ve assigned, position yourself (or your TA, or fellow students, or relevant campus resource) as the best place to turn for help. Students should feel that the best resources for success are honest ones.
Reach out to students you suspect might be struggling. Sometimes students don’t ask for help, even if they know they need it. By reaching out and establishing communication you help reduce one significant barrier.
Ask students to reflect on academic integrity and on their learning progress. Give students the chance to recognize their own learning and capability.
Illustrate to students the explicit connection between the tasks you assign and student learning and mastery. This includes modeling the real-world value of classroom work for students; show how the task you’ve given them will be an integral part of their future, professional lives.
Manage student anxiety with the language you use to talk about assessments. Often the language we use to talk about exams or assessments elevates them to monoliths that can signal to students that exams are the single most important element of the class.
Ask students to reflect on academic integrity and on their learning progress. Give students the chance to recognize their own learning and capability.
Remain empathetic and flexible. If one of your students is having trouble meeting a deadline due to other life commitments, work with that student.
Assess authentically
There are an endless variety of definitions for the term authentic assessment. Most definitions focus on this critical aspect: authentic assessment presents a “real-world” task as a classroom assignment. That is, the form the assessment takes is modeled after something students may encounter later in their professional lives.
For example, if my goal is for students to know how to synthesize aspirin in a laboratory, a good authentic assessment might be for students to (under supervision) follow a procedure to actually synthesize aspirin. The task of synthesizing a new chemical is authentic because that task exists outside of academia. Contrast this with a multiple choice exam: while the multiple choice exam might superficially allow students to demonstrate knowledge of the involved chemicals or processes, that exam format exists only in the classroom.
Make cheating less viable
Make the assignment extremely specific to the content and context of your course. This will help minimize the chances that students are able to dishonestly source material from the internet or past students. Term projects and other signature assignments are examples of this: assignments that are so specific and unique to each course, it becomes extremely difficult to find applicable material among cheating resources.
Help students in your class form study groups. Especially in an online course it may not be clear to students how to go about forming a study group with their classmates. You might survey your students about study groups and those who are interested can provide you with their contact information to share with other interested classmates.
Consider allowing exam revisions. Allowing revisions for even partial credit can turn exams into a learning opportunity instead of strictly a high-stakes assessment tool.
Design open-book/-resource assessments that ask students to apply their learned knowledge rather than simply repeat it.
Vary your assessment questions each quarter. By creating new assessment questions, answers to questions from previous quarters become a lot less useful to students. Also, by rotating new questions into the mix each quarter you extend the “lifespan” of each individual one.
Take steps to move away from the model of one or two high-stakes exams per quarter. Consider instead assigning a multiphase project that contains smaller milestones for students to meet.
You are encouraged to use the Seattle University Academic Integrity Tutorial to help your students understand what is acceptable. The Academic Integrity Tutorial is a learning aid to help students understand the “dos” and “don’ts” of academic life. There are a variety of questions and answers with explanations to help students understand academic best practices.
Formerly accessible through SUOnline, you can now download the Academic Integrity Tutorial as a .zip file which can be imported as a quiz into your Canvas course. For instructions regarding how to import this quiz into your Canvas courses, review the step-by-step instructions.
Further, include a link to the Academic Integrity Policy in your syllabus, so students understand the penalties.
Instructions to import academic integrity tutorial into canvas
This is a tough one. In academia, so much material exists digitally (or is very easy to digitize) that it’s impossible to totally prevent that material from ending up on the internet. Sites like Chegg and others host student-submitted content—often the answers to assessment questions or other cheating resources—enabling and providing a platform for students to engage in academic dishonesty. One recommended practice is to talk to your students about why this is a problem. Some faculty have found success by writing statements specifically asking students not to engage with sites like those named above.
If you know or suspect your teaching material has made its way onto one of these sites, you have a couple options:
- If you can positively connect the site user to an individual student, you can hold that student accountable. This kind of identification is, unfortunately, very difficult to be ascertain but sometimes even the threat of repercussion is enough to deter cheating.
- Most sites in this vein have takedown request forms available on their site. Takedown requests invoke the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the copyright protection of your intellectual property. These forms typically ask you to provide the URL for the content in question and a brief statement on why you believe it infringes on your copyright.
- Brock University provides useful templates for requesting materials be removed from both Canadian and US Websites on their Faculty-owned Materials page.