Honoring the code: How to promote academic honesty

Below is an excerpt of guidelines distributed at the talk sponsored by the Teaching Resource Center. More suggestions and other workshop materials are available from the center. Contact them at 982-2815 or trc-uva@virginia. Some articles are on the Web site at http://trc.virginia.edu

• Talk about academic integrity in class.

• Include your definitions of cheating and/or plagiarism with class rules on your syllabus and Web site (the Instructional Toolkit has a section for adding a statement about honor at toolkit.virginia.edu).

• Rewrite the honor pledge as you would like students to apply it in particular situations and state your policies clearly, in writing.

• Help students understand what constitutes plagiarism by distributing and discussing examples of plagiarism and correct citation.

• Make cheating more difficult or less appealing by incorporating several different ways for students to demonstrate their knowledge: break long papers or projects up into smaller segments that could be submitted throughout the semester; have students create a paper trail with assignments such as outlines, bibliographies and interim drafts.

• Think carefully before giving any assignment, paper or exam significantly more weight in the final grade than other course requirements. Heavily weighted assignments can seem a particularly tempting target for students who might want to improve their grades easily and quickly.

• Consider making students aware that you know how to discover papers taken from the Internet.

• Do not allow students to change paper topics close to the deadline.

• For multiple choice, short answer, problem sets or other quasi-standardized tests, devise multiple versions with questions in different orders.

• Spell out the consequences of cheating.

• Make course requirements challenging but not overwhelming.