Academic Honesty and Authentication

Introduction

Academic honesty and student authentication (verification of a student’s identity) in distance education often go hand in hand. Because of the lack of face-to-face classroom time, it can be difficult for instructors to know if the student enrolled in the class is the actual person who is logging in and turning in their own work. The following sections provide information about PCC’s policies on academic honesty and some suggestions for ensuring academic integrity and authentication in the online environment.

PCC’s Academic Honesty Policy

All distance education courses currently follow AP 5500.

Policy Guidelines

Conduct prohibited by the College:

Dishonesty, such as cheating, plagiarism, fabrication, or knowingly furnishing false information to the College or its officials; intentionally or knowingly helping or attempting to help another commit an act of dishonesty.
Unauthorized use of computers and telecommunication resources, including but not limited to:
- Unauthorized entry into a file to use, read, or change the contents, or for any other purpose;
- Unauthorized transfer of a file;
- Unauthorized use of another individual’s identification and password;
- Use of computing facilities to interfere with the work of another student, faculty member or College official;
- Use of computing and telecommunications resources to send obscene or abusive messages.

What this means for distance education

The guidelines for academic honesty in face-to-face courses also apply to students in online and hybrid courses. Plagiarism, disruptive behavior (such as improper discussion posts or poor netiquette) and taking an exam for someone else are all violations of student conduct guidelines.

There is little evidence to suggest that online and hybrid students are more likely to cheat. In fact, the few studies that have researched this issue found that online students were less likely to engage in academic dishonesty than those in face-to-face classes. In part this may be because of the nature of the distance education environment where, because of regular and substantive interaction guidelines, instructors often have more interactions with individual students.

Students who are able to learn at their own speed and who are provided with many different forms of alternative assessments may also be less likely to ‘panic cheat’, that is, impulsively cheat during an exam (Stuber-McEwen, Wiseley & Hoggat).

Perhaps the biggest challenge in the distance education environment is student authentication. Using PCC’s LMS secure login system and incorporating best practices for regular effective contact — such as getting to know students and their writing styles — are effective means to help to ensure that students registered for the course are truly the ones contributing to it. For instructors teaching hybrid courses with proctored exams on campus, this may be less of an issue than for those who are teaching fully online courses for high stakes exams.

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Individual Course Policy

It is important for instructors to establish clear expectations in their online syllabus as to what constitutes academically dishonest behavior.

Creating guidelines for academic honesty

Clearly explain what constitutes cheating, plagiarism and proper netiquette.
Establish classroom guidelines in your online syllabus for the types of behavior that are appropriate and inappropriate.
Provide students with standards for groupwork and how those differ from unauthorized collaboration on class projects.
Let students know what the consequences will be for academic dishonest behavior.

Preventing plagiarism

Raise students’ awareness by designing rules for academic honesty and classroom behavior as part of an initial class activity.
Provide external resources on how to avoid plagiarism (for example, Purdue OWL’s page on plagiarism).
Give students examples and/or provide activities describing how to properly cite sources and how to paraphrase properly.
Ask students to provide their source material as part of each formal writing assignment.
Create a range of authentic assessments in the course design that measure critical thinking skills and knowledge integration instead of relying solely on objective tests.
Use test banks which randomize questions and answers on objective tests.

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Academic Honesty and CANVAS

In addition to incorporating best practices for academic honesty into online and hybrid courses, there features and additional software services that help prevent plagiarism in CANVAS. Please check back to this section periodically, as software packages and features are added and updated frequently.

Turnitin

Turnitin is web-based service which can be used directly with CANVAS that identifies plagiarism in student work. The software then completes an Originality Checking process that compares student work against internet and database sources.

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