Instructor's Guide

 

Quizzes, Reflective Questions and Activities

This tutorial on Academic Integrity, Plagiarism, and Copyright is applicable to all Penn State courses and helps to fulfill the instructor's obligation to address the topic of academic integrity. Because the content of this tutorial is very comprehensive, you may want to pick and choose sections for your students to complete, depending on the content of your course. If you are using this tutorial to ensure the students in your class are well informed about Penn State's policy on Academic Integrity, you may wish to assign the tutorial as work to be done outside of class, or even as work to be completed before the semester begins.

If you are planning to use the plagiarism detection tool "Turnitin.com" in your course, we recommend that you have your students work through this tutorial first to be sure they understand what plagiarism is and the consequences of being caught plagiarizing. More information about "Turnitin.com" is available at http://tlt.its.psu.edu/turnitin.

 

The following assignments are embedded in the Academic Integrity tutorial:

• Activity 1: Quiz - Plagiarism and Cheating
• Activity 2: Quiz - Copyright and Fair Use
• Activity 3: Quiz - Excuses and Penalties
• Activity 4: Activity - Case Study Situation

 

Relationship to Other iStudy Tutorials

This tutorial is directly related to the Search Strategies and Source Evaluation tutorial. Many of the strategies illustrated here are used when one is accessing information.

 

Suggested In-class Methods of Presentation

Many faculty members are increasingly frustrated by students' academic integrity violations and by the long and stressful process that they must go through to correct, prove, and/or penalize these violations. What can we do, then, to try to raise awareness among students and to find ways to make violations less likely?

What follows is a collection of suggestions for staff and faculty (both authors and instructors) on how to design and run courses to discourage academic integrity violations and to encourage proper research methods and student learning.

 

Suggestions on How to Encourage Academic Integrity and Discourage Plagiarism and Cheating

compiled by

Ian W. Riddell—Instructional Materials Designer

Penn State World Campus

February 2003

 

Below you will find a collection of suggestions for designers, authors, and instructors of courses. These pages suggest ways to help build courses to lead students away from temptation; both through raising their awareness of how to do proper research and writing and through designing assignments to make it more difficult for them to cheat.

 

What follows is an amalgamation and adaptation of material from several sources:

Colyer, Anita. 2001. "13 Design tips to foster academic honesty". E-mail summary of discussion at February 2001 Instructional Design and Development "open mic" session. [Colyer]

PSU Libraries. 2002. "Information literacy and you." A modular, on-line course in beginning research methods. [LIAS]

PSU Teaching and Learning with Technology. 2001. Cyber-plagiarism: Detection and prevention. Web site: http://tlt.its.psu.edu/plagiarism/facguide. [TLT]

Harris, Robert. 2002. Virtual Salt: Anti-plagiarism: Strategies for research papers. Web site: http://www.virtualsalt.com/antiplag.htm. Site adapted from: Harris, Robert. 2001. The plagiarism handbook. Los Angeles: Pyrczak Publishing.) [Harris]

 

Note:These suggestions have been categorized into sections for course designers, authors, and instructors, but they may be useful to all three groups and to students as well.

 

Course Designers

• Include a statement in the course syllabus about academic integrity policies. What is academic dishonesty? What are some examples? How will it be addressed? What are the possible bad outcomes for the student? Academic dishonesty cases can range from cheating on exams, sharing answers on lesson assignments, falsifying data, copying another student's work, downloading papers written by other individuals from a Web site, plagiarizing from textbooks or articles, and many more! [Colyer]
• Link to the appropriate college info, if available. Many individual colleges have their own specific forms and procedures that are to be used. [Colyer]
• Identify courses at risk. Undergraduate general education courses with high enrollments typically draw from a large pool of on-campus students, for whom it is easier to exchange information or answers for a particular course's assignments or exams. Tests and exams that use multiple-choice questions are more easily "cheatable." Writing-intensive courses (or even undergrad courses with lots of essay assignments) are more likely to foster plagiarism problems. [Colyer]
• In cases where collaborative assignments are included in a course, clearly define processes, structure and purview of "group" feedback, and expected outcomes. Will the outcome of the group's work be a single paper with all three students' names on it? or individual papers submitted by each of the three individual students? Be clear in stating how any such collaboration will be evaluated. As a part of such activities, it is also a good idea to have each student (near the end of the process) provide an assessment of what s/he contributed and what s/he perceived that other team members contributed. [Colyer]

 

Authors:

• Even in lower-level undergraduate courses, teach students how to cite material that they did not generate themselves. Mention use of quotation marks or indentation of blocks of text, teach students the formal citation style of the course's discipline area, or identify an informal style a student can use (for example, "from Ember and Ember text, page 14"). [Colyer]
• Explain to students how proper citation of sources increases the caliber of their writing. Citation strengthens their writing by forcing them to be clear when presenting arguments and counter-arguments. It shows their instructor that they have put time, effort, and thought into the assignment. And it allows them to be engaged in "the great conversation" carried on by academic thinkers. [Harris]
• Make your assignments specific. Don't just ask students to write a paper about "Hamlet" or "The Electoral College." Use specific instructions like "Discuss how Shakespeare used flowers in Hamlet to signify rites of passage. Be sure to reference the deaths of Ophelia and Rozencrantz and Guildenstern" or "Discuss proposals to amend the process of electing presidents. Should the Electoral College be abolished? Be sure to reference opinions from your local news media as well as national media." This may eliminate the possibility that students can find complete papers to copy and will force them to assimilate materials from several sources. [TLT]
• Provide specific details regarding expectations of student's assignments, such as the structure of response and how much time an assignment might take. Identify any time-consuming assignments or long papers in advance so the student can plan "extra" time for specific lessons. [Colyer/TLT]
• Require students to use specific resources in their research: sources published in the past year, personal interviews, specific articles or book chapters. Be clear about the types of sources you would like the students to use: only one Web reference, two articles from the course readings booklet, no more than one article 5 or more years old, one article from a specific journal. This guides the students to appropriate research and can show them the breadth of materials available in the field. [Harris]
• For courses that have papers, require multiple points of interaction. Students can submit in steps: identify topic, provide outline, provide list of sources, provide rough draft, submit final paper, submit revisions based on instructor input. This is good instructional design, too! Breaking an "intimidating" writing assignment up into steps helps the adult learner—who may have some writing anxiety—accomplish the task in subsets of more manageable small steps. [Colyer/TLT]
• Ask your students to submit their research notes. This will encourage them to keep neat and accurate notes as they work and will allow you to guide them toward better notetaking if they have problems citing their research. [TLT]
• Ask students to submit a "meta-learning essay." What did they learn while they worked on this research? How has their view of the subject changed? What was challenging about the work?
• Include a variety of assessments, not just multiple choice. It might be a good idea to include several assessments that require written responses. [Colyer]
• Describe the research/writing process to your students. Encourage your students to work through "Information Literacy Badges at Penn State" (http://sites.psu.edu/informationliteracybadges/), which outlines the research method and gives students guidelines for evaluating sources. This is especially helpful in lower-level courses where students may have little experience doing research and writing college essays.
• Make assignments as unique to the student as possible. Ask them to include personal or family history, current or local issues, and personal reflection into the work they submit to you. This requires more thought and effort than just reiterating concepts and definitions and allows you to get to know them better, which aids in your working relationship with them. It also allows you to learn their writing style. [TLT]
• Avoid multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank questions on tests and exams. These are the easiest types of exams to cheat on. These questions also require less understanding and synthesis on the part of students. With essay answers you can be sure of their comprehension and will also be able to compare these exams with other writing the student has submitted. [TLT]
• Set an example. When you write your syllabus materials be sure to properly cite your references and provide students with bibliographies/lists of references—either in each lesson or at the end of the course. This will provide the student with a model for the expected style and procedure for citation and shows that the University's policies and mission apply to the entire academic community.

Instructors:

• If you feel you need to use a "plagiarism detection" Web site (i.e., Turnitin.psu.edu), make sure you warn students in advance that such avenues will be used in exploration of suspected academic dishonesty cases. [Colyer]
• Be prepared with resources for the student who asks for aid in avoiding plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty. Have some idea ahead of time how you would describe procedures for citation and paraphrasing in your discipline. Refer them to the appropriate style/publication manual for your discipline.
• Be aware of warning signs or clues about academic integrity violations (the following are fleshed out on Harris's Web site):
• Mixed citation style
• Lack of references or quotes
• Unusual formatting
• Off-topic paper
• Datedness of resources or ideas
• Anachronisms
• Anomalies of diction and style (mixed levels or writing, too-complex vocabulary, etc.) [Harris]

 

Key Points

Integrity is a moral value that resides in the affective domain. Therefore, the best way to help students develop integrity is by presenting the relevant information and then giving them opportunities to apply it to various situations through conscious thought and discussion. A primary goal of this tutorial is to encourage students to develop a personal philosophy of academic integrity based on Penn State principles.

This tutorial begins with a description of academic integrity and the policies at Penn State, followed by information about plagiarism, cheating, copyright, fair use, excuses students use, and penalties for academic dishonesty. The content has been broken into topics to allow instructional flexibility. Instructors can use the entire tutorial, or select just the topics they want to cover. Quizzes present various situations for students to evaluate. The final activity is a series of situations the students are asked to evaluate and respond to. The final activity would also work well for small group discussions or as discussion board topics using an electronic message board. Instructors may wish to add additional or different responses to the final activity, depending on their course content.

The key points to make on this topic are that academic dishonesty affects the student as well as the entire community, ignorance isn't an acceptable excuse for committing academic dishonesty, and academic dishonesty has consequences.

 

Assessment Criteria

The following assessment criteria was used in developing this tutorial and may be useful to instructors in evaluating student performance.

 

Assessment Criteria

Where	Domain	Activities	%
Content of iStudy Tutorial	Knowledge	The student can define academic integrity, cheating, plagiarism, copyright, and fair use.
Activities in iStudy Tutorial	Comprehension	The student can identify instances of cheating, plagiarism, and copyright violation.
Activities in iStudy Tutorial	Application	The student can apply copyright rules to a situation to determine if use of the materials is OK or not.
Case Study Activity	Synthesis	The student can develop his/her own philosophy of academic integrity based on the Penn State principles.
			100%

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