Tips for Class

home Academic Integrity Additional Information for Faculty tips for class

Ensuring integrity in your classroom is probably best approached as a two-part assignment. The first part involves educating the students as to your expectations for the integrity of their work in that class. This should include the basic elements that are expected by the University, along with those expectations that are specific to your class or discipline. The second part of ensuring integrity in the class involves actively preventing academic misconduct and confronting situations where you believe academic misconduct might have occurred. Below are tips that you might find helpful in creating and maintaining an environment of integrity in your classroom.

• Print your expectations in your syllabus (here are some examples).
• Print the URL for the Office of Student Conduct in your syllabus, from there, students can review the Code.
• If you maintain a web site for the class, link to the Office of Student Conduct.
• Talk about your expectations in your first few class sessions. Talk about "why", not just "what".
• Contact the Office of Student Conduct to get a staff member or student to come to your class for a presentation on academic integrity.
• Print the honor pledge on your syllabus, on your exams, and have students write it on their written work.
• Remind students of your expectations for integrity prior to all tests, quizzes and projects.
• If the course requires a research paper, incorporate a short lecture on how to do the research and where to go on the campus for help with questions in this area. This may include how to cite Internet or electronic sources. Follow this link for resources in this area. The library is a great resource.
• Require students to submit topics for your approval, and then produce drafts prior to submission of the final paper, and don't accept last minute changes. Many faculty choose to keep the draft for comparative purposes with the final submission.
• Use in class writing assignments to gauge student progress if appropriate to the material.
• Carefully monitor the process of handing in materials to protect students from the theft of their work by others.
• If you will be using Blue Books for an exam, have each student turn in an empty book the class prior to the exam. Redistribute the books randomly on the day of the exam.
• Provide students the scratch paper they need for the exam.
• Have all students place their bookbags at the front of the classroom prior to handing out the exam.
• If possible, seat students every other row. Administer more than one version of the exam, even if it means that the pages of the exam are just in a different order.
• Number the exams that are handed out and require that they be returned.
• Have your exams proctored at all times, and make sure to move around the room.
• Use different versions of the exam if you allow students to take exams early or late.
• Clearly mark the incorrect answers on a test using a mark that passes through the answer.
• Let the class know that you will photocopying a random sample of the exams for your files prior to returning them to the class.
• Watch for changes in students' behavior, their placement in the testing environment, and their appearance.
• Be aware of items that make it difficult to see the students' face, such as hats or sunglasses.