Academic Integrity in Online Environments

ACADEMIC INTEGRITY

The following pages are part of the Academic Integrity toolkit entries.

You can jump around or review each page in sequence by following the hyperlinks:

  1. Academic Integrity Section Overview
  2. Promoting Academic Honesty
  3. Investigating Suspected Academic Dishonesty
  4. Academic Integrity in Online Environments (This page)
  5. Artificial Intelligence and Academic Integrity
  6. Sample Artificial Intelligence Syllabus Statements
  7. Additional Resources

How do I promote academic integrity in an online environment?

There are some strategies you can take to promote academic honesty in an online environment. But first, please be sure to review the information on reducing the temptation to cheat.

Honor Statement

Include an honor statement in the instructions when you administer an online quiz or test. Many people are honest so if you make it explicit, then they will follow. Remind them that the quiz is not collaborative, and it is not OK to “use a lifeline” or help each other.

This is an example of the honor statement you can use:

“You may use your books and notes while taking the test but you must work on your own. Do not share your answers or discuss with anyone, even after completing the test. You will have 60 minutes to complete the test up until the deadline of Tuesday at 11:55 PM. All tests will be automatically submitted at 11:55 PM regardless of how much time the timer says because that is the final deadline. Please read the statement below carefully before beginning the test: ‘By selecting, Attempt quiz now, I acknowledge that I am the assigned student taking the quiz and the work is entirely my own.’”

Create Higher-Order Questions

Create quizzes that encourage knowledge transfer vs. recall and consider using higher-order questions. Open-ended, analytical, or problem-solving questions are harder to copy than mechanical and discrete questions. This can also include questions where students must explain how they arrived at an answer.

Modify Question Settings

  • Shuffling the options within questions (e.g., multiple-choice options). However, for shuffling within questions, if you have any “all of the above,” “none of the above,” or “A and C are correct” kind of options and enable this setting, it is recommended that those questions be rewritten to say “all of these options,” “none of these options,” or something along these lines.
  • Build a large pool of questions and randomize the questions pulled from your question bank. The larger the question bank, the more chances that students will get entirely different sets of questions. 
  • Set up the quiz to show one question at a time. 
  • Make the test open book. This works well for higher-order questions and open-ended questions that assess critical thinking and problem-solving. This also gives students a chance to cite the content of the class and/or additional sources.
  • Consider releasing scores or answers after the quiz closes. This way someone who finished the quiz first cannot pass the answers along to classmates who have yet to take the quiz.

For more information on quiz settings, please refer to Quiz Creation: Settings Links to an external site..