Enhancing Academic Integrity in the Classroom
Both instructors and students can consider steps to enhance academic integrity in the Carnegie Mellon community. These suggestions are drawn from ongoing conversations with students and faculty over the years and from the literature on academic integrity. The steps below include ways individual instructors can enhance support for student learning and integrity.
Although these strategies will not eliminate all instances of cheating, they can significantly alter the circumstances that often leading to cheating, thereby mitigating a student's perceived need to resort to decision making that compromises their integrity.
Designing courses
The Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence has a number of resources to help you, as an instructor, to design courses and educational experiences that minimize the opportunity for students to breach academic integrity, but they also address how to respond to cheating and plagiarism if they occur in your course. A number of these resources are outlined below but instructors should feel free to contact the Eberly Center with any additional questions or to schedule an individual consultation.
Addressing potential cheating behaviors
To mitigate cheating on assignments and exams, consider the potential reasons why students might be cheating. In this module that provides guidance for solving teaching problems, potential reasons are matched with strategies to address cheating both proactively and reactively.
Planning writing assignments
Incorporating Writing Into Your Course provides a set of strategies to consider as you plan your writing assignments. Strategies that focus on preventing plagiarism as well as detecting and addressing plagiarism are included.
Communicating your expectations
Your syllabus is a primary vehicle for providing students with guidance about your expectations for the course. Resources pertaining to course design include examples of written policies and expectations from Carnegie Mellon instructors, courses, and departments such as history, computer science and modern languages.
Considering cultural variations
Recognizing and Addressing Cultural Variations in the Classroom (pdf) is a publication jointly produced by the Eberly Center and the Student Academic Success Center. This document briefly describes academic integrity in the larger context, e.g., the possible variations and their implications for students who come from non-U.S. cultures, as well as possible strategies for dealing with these differences.