Ensuring academic integrity presents a unique challenge in online courses. There are several ways to design assessments and leverage online tools to ensure that students continue to uphold the Code of Conduct and Honor Code in an online course.
Best practices to promote Academic Integrity include:
- Draft an Academic Integrity policy statement for your class. This statement may include:
- a message that academic integrity is valued and academic dishonesty will not be tolerated; include what the consequences of cheating are;
- test-taking/assignment mode, software, and rules, including specific behaviors which may constitute academic dishonesty for the course, including policies as they relate to group projects, social media, plagiarism; and
- The UT Code of Conduct and Honor Code.
Put your Academic Integrity policy statement in your 1) syllabus; 2) a pre-recorded or live lecture; and 3) in assignment instructions.
It is important to clearly outline expectations for assessment and to reinforce these expectations frequently. Students should consistently hear the message to promote adherence to the expectations.
- Talk with students explicitly about why a particular regime of assessment has been chosen as well as the benefits of that choice for learning. Design assessments that are meaningful and relevant for learning.
- Take reasonable steps to deter cheating and avoid situations that heighten the incentive or opportunity to cheat.
- Design good assessments. That is, write effective, discriminating test questions that require higher-order thinking, to which the answer cannot be Googled.
- Consider varied assessment formats, including projects, papers, and presentations. Instructors who rely on traditional exam or quiz formats may want to consider varied question types, including short-answer or essay questions.
- Drop the lowest test or quiz grade.
- Consider giving open-book, open-note assessments.
- For assessments administered in Canvas Quizzes, use question banks, and shuffle question order and response option order.
- For written assessments/assignments, use Turnitin to detect plagiarism.
- If instructors wish to implement AI-based online proctoring for high-stakes assessments that are closed-book, closed-note and take place entirely within a Canvas Quiz, the Chrome extension Proctorio integrates with Canvas Quizzes and is available in all Canvas courses. More information on Proctorio can be found below.
If an incident of academic dishonesty occurs, take the matter seriously and be mindful in your response. Although few students are likely to cheat, in the event of potential academic misconduct, gather and review evidence for the case before making any decisions about how to proceed. Determine an appropriate course of action based on the evidence available to you. Involve other professionals in this review process, as needed, and familiarize yourself with UT’s Conduct Process. If a penalty is ultimately imposed, instructors must report or refer the issue to Student Conduct and Academic Integrity in the Office of the Dean of Students.
For more information about academic integrity in online learning, visit the Office of the Dean of Students website.
Proctorio
Proctorio is a remote proctoring tool that is available for assessments delivered via Canvas Quizzes to monitor student behavior and deter cheating. Proctorio is an AI-based Google Chrome extension which integrates into Canvas and monitors and records students and their screens during Canvas Quiz assessments; it can also partially lock-down a student’s computer while taking the assessment.
Proctorio is most appropriate for high-stakes, closed-book, closed-note assessments, in which the entire assessment is completed within a Canvas Quiz. Also note that Proctorio is not a replacement for other countermeasures to deter cheating, but rather an enhancement for quizzes already designed with academic integrity in mind. Instructors should continue to write effective, discriminating exam questions with large question banks and shuffled questions/answers.
If instructors use Proctorio, it is crucial to:
- Prepare students well.
(1) Communicate with students about how Proctorio works. Explain that instructors will make judgement calls about what behaviors constitute an academic integrity violation, not the AI, and that only instructors will have access to the recordings.
(2) Include information about Proctorio on the syllabus.
(3) Conduct a practice Proctorio quiz with students to ensure any technical hiccups can be addressed before a high stakes testing scenario. Make sure this practice quiz is configured to match the Proctorio configuration of the real assessment.
(4) Prepare a troubleshooting guide.
(5) Provide other information that adequately prepares them for the Proctorio assessment experience, such as the technical steps required for students to access the Proctorio assessment and expectations and instructions for taking a proctored assessment using Proctorio.
- Educate yourself about the complexities and potential pitfalls of Proctorio.
(1) Think carefully about which Proctorio settings are most appropriate for your assessment, given the assessment rules and student circumstances.
(2) Be aware that certain settings may cause students difficulty accessing the assessment or may not work well with some students’ computers. The recommended settings in the Proctorio Best Practices handbook aim to address the most common use cases.
(3) Instructors will benefit from reading through each and every one of the links in the Proctorio section of the Toolbox to learn more about installation info, best practices to ensure a smooth testing experience, and information on managing SSD accommodations.
(4) Add extra time to the Canvas Quiz to account for the time it will take students to complete the Proctorio onboarding and verification process (see Best Practices document and Proctorio set-up in Canvas instructions).
(5) Note all student SSD accommodations when setting up the Proctorio Quiz (see the Toolbox).
(6) After the assessment, instructors must manually review all behavioral flags and suspicious results in the Proctorio Gradebook to determine whether the flags for each student were triggered by a true violation or are the result of a false positive. It may be helpful to iteratively adjust the Proctorio Behavior Settings during this review. Be mindful of the fact that no Proctorio flag automatically guarantees that academic misconduct took place.