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Professor zone

Welcome! Our goal is to help you create a course environment where academic integrity expectations are clear, assessments are fair, inclusive, and maximize integrity, and any misconduct is addressed.

In this page, we provide information about:

  • Understanding academic misconduct
  • Elements of course design to maximize academic integrity and minimize misconduct: communication, assessment, and process
  • How to report and address academic misconduct
  • Next steps

Understanding academic misconduct

As you’re designing your course, including the communications and assessments, consider the main reasons students engage in misconduct (you can use that information in your course design to maximize integrity):

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Pressure

Examples: scholarship or visa requirements, program requirements, time pressures, high stakes, stress, poor wellbeing, peers, parents...

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Knowledge

Examples: expectations (course, university), different cultural experiences, how to work with integrity, time management skills...

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Opportunity

Examples: misconduct seems overly easy, re-used assessments (e.g., lab reports, multiple choice questions), poorly-designed assessments...

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Rationalization

Examples: "It's not a big deal", "Others are doing it", "My prof doesn't care about me", "No one will do anything about it"...

Maximizing academic integrity

Professors can support academic integrity by (1) communicating with students about it, (2) designing courses and assessments that equitably maximize student learning, students’ experiences and academic integrity and (3) getting involved in the academic integrity and misconduct processes, including detecting, reporting and addressing misconduct. Here are a few key suggestions:

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Communication

- Discuss academic integrity values, expectations and requirements (e.g., in the syllabus, including exam format and any remote proctoring).
- Open lines of communication for students to discuss concerns with you (e.g., “Can I use artificial intelligence to make my answers better?”).
- Help students learn to work with integrity, including through open conversations, our academic integrity module, considering their future careers and using academic integrity resources.
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Assessment

- Design equitable assessments that align with learning outcomes and course work (e.g., lectures, learning activities), considering principles such as Universal Design for Learning.
- Design assessments to maximize integrity, considering aspects such as question or task type, time allocated, open or closed book, and individual or collaborative work.
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Process

- Identify which methods to detect misconduct are appropriate for your situation, such as progressive assessments, discovery interview, indicators in written text or proctoring.
- Report misconduct using uOttawa’s process, and consider options such as the pedagogical approach outlined in Academic Regulation A-4 (Academic Integrity and Academic Misconduct).

The Teaching and Learning Support Service has expertise and resources to further support your efforts and delve deeper into each of these areas.

Detecting and addressing misconduct

There are a number of ways to detect misconduct: 

  • The work may be very similar to already published work. You can use Ouriginal in Brightspace to check students’ work.
  • Two students may submit similarly unusual answers to a question.
  • You may see students copying each other. If so, try to have a second person observe the situation, as well. 

Detecting misconduct involving artificial intelligence: detectors for artificial intelligence currently do not detect many cases of use of artificial intelligence tools, and may never do so effectively. We recommend that you maximize your approaches related to communication and assessment design. In cases where misconduct is suspected, a discovery interview could be very useful.

If you detect misconduct, see Academic Regulation A-4 (Academic Integrity and Academic Misconduct) for the procedure to follow. 

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Have a question? Looking for other resources?

It would be our pleasure to assist you with further information. 
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