Navigating Academic Integrity: New Guidelines and Practices for Teachers
In this blog post we want to take the opportunity to remind you of the renewed Aalto University Code of Academic Integrity in Studies and share some practical strategies for preventing cheating in studies.
Before we jump into solutions, let’s take a brief look at the reasons behind plagiarism.
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Plagiarism is a multi-faceted issue and the reasons behind students’ actions can vary. Strittmatter and Bratton (2016) outline three reasons behind plagiarism:
- Unintentional plagiarism occurs when students aren’t familiar with citation practices.
- Intentional plagiarism involves knowingly presenting someone else’s ideas as one’s own.
- Contextual plagiarism rises when students feel pressured by heavy workloads and tight deadlines.
By recognizing the diverse motivations behind academic dishonesty, educators can implement targeted strategies to mitigate these behaviours. Below are some practical measures to consider:
Clear Instructions and Communication
Clear communication about ethical academic writing practices is key to preventing misconduct. Start by informing students about course citation practices, AI usage restrictions and rules on whether assignments / exams can be completed in collaboration with other student in the beginning of the course and discuss them in class. To reduce the risk for plagiarism that results from tight schedules and heavy workloads, set structured deadlines to help students manage their workload, and encourage open communication about deadline struggles.
Adapting Assignments and Exams to the era of AI
If you are looking for more strongly supervised assessment options, you may arrange exams in the EXAM rooms on campus, or host a bring-your-own-device exam with the help of Safe Exam Browser.
Alternatively, you may diversify assessments so that assessment is more authentic and requires thought and effort. You can for example include projects, labwork, field work, presentations, reflections or oral exams to your course. Clearly define the role of AI in these assignments.
Multiple-choice quizzes, especially open-book exams completed at home, pose challenges in managing AI usage and other types of cheating. To make quizzes harder to pass solely by AI tools, you may incorporate additional resources* to the quizzes and ask student to interpret those to answer questions. AI might struggle with interpreting *additional resources such as data tables, graphs or images, but this might change as the technology develops.
Once you make changes to assessment practices it’s important to balance the difficulty level so that assessment criteria remain aligned with course intended learning outcome.
AI usage and the culture of integrity
Transparency in AI usage is crucial for both students and teachers. The Turnitin tool offers AI usage reports to help identify potentially AI-generated content, though it has limitations in accuracy. Most importantly, ask students to disclose any AI tools used and describe how they used them, whether for ideation, drafting, grammar, or revisions. You may ask student to keep a copy of the original text that they fed for revision into the AI tool.
Could the culture of academic integrity improve if teachers also shared how they use AI in assignments, assessments, and feedback? Openness about AI usage should be mutual, and it is possible that it will motivate students to produce authentic work if they know feedback is human-written.
References and resources
Strittmatter, Connie & Bratton, Virginia. (2016). Teaching Plagiarism Prevention to College Students: An Ethics-Based Approach. 10.5771/9781442264427.
New guideline: Aalto University Code of Academic Integrity in Studies | Aalto University
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