Prevention and Student Education

For additional resources on teaching and assessment development, please visit eConestoga Guides and Faculty Learning Hub.

For more information on navigating testing situations, check out Teaching & Learning's Hub Post, "Testing Preparation: Providing Guidance for Students Taking Tests".

Make expectations consistent and clear

Expectations around authorized software, student collaboration, and testing behavior should be set early and repeated frequently through written and verbal communication. Develop a course protocol document that appeals to students’ virtues, principles, and reasoning.

Optionally, this can be done collaboratively, with input from students. Students’ perceptions of academic integrity will vary, and their understanding will be shaped by their past educational experiences. Ask them questions such as “What is academic honesty? What is academic dishonesty?”, “What can we do, together, to prevent dishonest activity in our course?” Use Conestoga’s Academic Integrity website or relevant policies and procedures to guide this activity.

Model integrity

Faculty should assess their practices and resources (slides, handouts, postings, publications, etc.) to ensure they are appropriately acknowledging and citing the work of others. This is an easy way to model attribution while teaching. Use phrases like, “As you can see I am quoting directly from _____; They conducted research on _____.” ; “This slide summarizes a research study by _____; You can see my citation here and the associated reference on the last slide.” ; “Here I am paraphrasing the findings of _________; Note the citation with the authors and the year.” When Conestoga employees lead by modelling scholarly behaviour, students follow.

Connect students to key supports

Academic Integrity is not the sole responsibility of faculty! Faculty should make use of supports for their own work, and refer students to other resources within the college, like Library Services, other academic team members, and Learning Skills Advisors.

Reduce anxiety and inspire autonomy

Students are more likely to cheat when they’re anxious or worried. Provide the scaffolding needed to make course outcomes achievable, and inspire student autonomy by offering some structured choices over the content and/or process and/or product that they are assigned. When possible, offer extensions. Although deferred deadlines are not always ideal or feasible, sometimes the only thing a panicking student needs to produce honest and authentic work is a little more time.

Become familiar with and enable detection tools 

Conestoga offers faculty with the option to utilize assessment detection tools, such as Turnitin Similarity Reports and Respondus Monitor for assessments. Some detection tools can serve as educational tools when enabled early in the semester and are allowed to provide students with timely feedback on their progress.

Never ignore misconduct

Despite all efforts to prevent it, some students might cheat. All Academic Integrity Violations should be filed using the Integrity Violations tab in the Employee Portal. When misconduct is ignored or dealt with only with "informal" warnings, penalties cannot escalate, students may not understand the seriousness of the situation, and cheating can become normalized.

Draw the line between mistakes and cheating

Define and demonstrate the differences between learning skills issues (formatting errors, poor citation technique, failure to include all required rubric elements) and cheating. Faculty should inform the class that errors are not considered academic offences, but they will be assessed on the rubric and have an impact on grades.

Provide an example of previous student work (with permission)

An example of previous work can increase student confidence in what their own assessment should look like. This will reduce the temptation to look for samples on file-sharing websites, or ask peers for copies of their assignments. Highlight how the exemplar meets expectations, and remind students that this resource is being presented as a guideline, not a template to copy.

Avoid recycling assignment prompts and topics

When possible, change the variables within topics each semester, or better yet, personalize the task to each student. This disincentivizes copying, and makes misconduct easier to identify when it does occur. Faculty who are not instructional designers may need to consult with their team or manager about options for modifying assignment topics.

 Re-Design assessments and rubrics with Gen AI in mind

Regularly review assignment and rubric designs to ensure that tasks are clear, relevant to learning outcomes and remain challenging for students. When updating, ensure it reflects the appropriate level of AI use permitted for the assessment. Review the Assignment Challenges Toolkit for guidance. 

If Gen AI is permitted, require gen AI statements 

Promote honesty and responsible use of gen AI by requiring gen AI-use statements when the tool is permitted. These statements prompt students to reflect on how gen AI contributed to their work and enforce transparency. 

Assess PROCESS and PRODUCT separately so that students can understand the expectations for both

Have an in-class workshop after the preliminary research phase, and ask students to bring evidence of their work to-date. Circulate and provide feedback and guidance, and if possible, reward this work with grades in the rubric. This supports the development of good writing skills in students, while also making plagiarism or AI-generation more difficult. In particular, generative AI is not good at producing convincing "rough drafts."

Limit the number of sources and the size of the final product

Carefully consider how much the student needs to research and write to demonstrate that they have met the course learning outcomes. Students who are overwhelmed are more likely to commit misconduct. Shorter assessments can also benefit faculty by reducing the time required to read and grade the final product.

Incorporate Verbal Components

For high-stakes assignments, consider including a verbal component. Verbal components, such as interviews and presentations, that require students to explain their work make it more difficult for students to cheat.

Restrict the range of acceptable sources

For written assessments that require research, consider restricting the range of acceptable sources (e.g., course materials, published books, and peer-reviewed articles). By clearly defining which sources are permitted, it limits the potential rise in the use of gen AI or questionable sources (e.g., file-sharing websites). 

Familiarize students with testing tools and expectations

Clearly and repeatedly communicate expectations for testing. For example, make sure that specific rules about cellphone use, breaks, talking during the testing period, and VPNs are conveyed multiple times in advance of the test. If students will be using specialized software, like Respondus Lockdown, provide opportunities to practice the tool before the test.

Refresh tests regularly

 Students can quickly snap photos of pages during or after a test, particularly in virtual testing environments, and share/sell them online or privately. Changing testing questions destroys the value of these old copies, and allows faculty to use previous tests and exams for student practice.

Create variations

Create multiple variations of the test each year. There are three common ways to achieve this:

1. Create question banks for virtual tests or in-person tests. For example, you may write 40-50 questions, and each student receives only 30 of them.
2. Changing names, numbers, or other variables in questions for in-person or virtual tests; for example, all students may be answering the same question, but some are discussing how “Rohit” handles the provided scenario while others are discussing how “Karen” or "Wei" should tackle it. This can reveal if a student copied the answer from another source.
3. For in-person tests, the questions can be re-ordered to create three or more iterations, so that all students answer the same questions but in different orders. No student will be sitting beside someone with the exact same order of questions that they are working through. This makes it hard to find an answer by glancing at a neighbour’s test.

Reading these tips provides a sense of ways that students might cheat, and some potential foils for these methods. Not every tip in this section can or should be used for every exam.

Provide information about the test 

Be a source of guidance and support. Provide students with details about the tests (e.g., structure, weight of each section, what to study), discuss study strategies, and consider providing old tests or practice questions

Require Student I.D.

Ask students to bring their Conestoga ONECard as identification to in-person tests. Students may attempt to write each other’s test in large cohorts. If using Respondus Monitor, enable the function that requires students to show their ID to the camera before writing.

Use a seating plan

Preventing students from selecting their own seatmates can prevent pre-mediated cheating. Consider numbering the seats 1-X and as students enter, assign them a random place. Another method is to number the test papers and place them randomly around the room, and then as students come in send each one to the next number. If specific students need to be kept separated, create a seating plan in advance and project it on the screen so students sit where assigned.

Use coloured paper for tests

For pen-and-paper tests, use different colours of paper each time. Use pale colours with good contrast so that students can still easily read the test. Students who bring cheat sheets will have a harder time concealing them if the cheat-sheet paper is a different colour than the test.

Have belongings stored securely 

Before the start of the exam, have all students move all personal belongings to the front of the classroom (or at least away from the student) and ensure that students only have permitted items on/near their desk. This practice prevents the use of unauthorized materials and electronic devices.  

Use active observation

If possible, faculty should avoid sitting just at the front of in-person tests, or moving about predictably. Sit behind and beside students. Circulate to the four corners of the room randomly during the test, and try to move quietly. Consider partnering with another faculty member or asking for a proctor to provide double coverage for exams. This also allows one person to escort students to the washroom for breaks, reducing chances to collaborate with peers or access cheat sheets. Record when the student enters and leaves the classroom (i.e., time in, time out) or if there are any odd behaviors.

Have a full class washroom break

Consider dividing in-person or virtual tests tests into two parts. Collect or close access to Part A after 50 minutes, provide everyone with a 15-minute break, and then hand out (or open access to) Part B on their return. This allows a mental and physical break for students, without opportunities to commit misconduct.

The following guide provides instructions on how to set up Turnitin on eConestoga with best practices in mind. All Conestoga faculty can access Turnitin to analyze students’ assignments for proper citation and referencing and identify possible plagiarism concerns. To access this feature, faculty must activate Turnitin for each assignment folder on eConestoga.

Guide to Setting Up Turnitin Infographic [PDF Document]

Guide to Setting Up Turnitin Accessible Version [PDF Document]

The Academic Integrity Office strongly recommends that students have access to their Turnitin Similarity Scores before the due date. Turnitin should be used as an educational tool for both the faculty and the student. Students can use their Turnitin Similarity Score as one editing tool to check their citing, referencing and paraphrasing before submitting their final version.

Feel free to share these infographics in your course shell. The Facts section found at the end of the infographics has talking points you can leverage when speaking to your students.

Contract Cheating Infographic

Contract Cheating Text-Only Infographic

File-Sharing Websites Infographic

File-Sharing Websites Text-Only Infographic

Plagiarism Infographic

Plagiarism Text-Only Infographic

TurnItIn Infographic

TurnItIn Text-Only Infographic

Online Exam Infographic

Online Exam Text-Only Infographic

Unauthorized Collaboration Infographic

Unauthorized Collaboration Text-Only Infographic

These education videos have been created by the Academic Integrity Office. You can share them with your students, or embed them in your course shell:

How to Check and Use Turnitin to Edit Your Work

Student AI Demo 2024

Academic Integrity Self Defence

Dangers of Contract Cheating

The Academic Integrity Office offers two standard workshops:

Our workshop can be virtual or in-person. With sufficient advance notice, we are happy to accommodate special requests for workshops of different lengths, or with a narrower targeted focus. The office also offers workshops in collaboration with writing services.

To book workshops with the Academic Integrity Office, the Writing Services Team, or other student success teams, visit the Student Success Sharepoint and use the Request a Workshop form.