Academic integrity isn't just about catching cheaters, it's about nurturing the ethical foundations that will serve our students throughout their lives. As educators, we're not learning police; we're mentors helping students develop the character and skills they need to succeed honestly.
Here's the challenge: your definition of academic integrity might be completely different from your students', and even from your colleagues’. Cultural backgrounds, past experiences, family expectations, and peer influences all shape how students understand honesty in academic work. This disconnect creates opportunities for misunderstanding and, unfortunately, misconduct.
The solution? Build a classroom culture rooted in trust, clarity, and mutual respect. Before we can expect integrity from our students, we must model it ourselves. This means being present and approachable, demonstrating good scholarship practices, and treating students with the respect and dignity we want them to show others.
Michele Pacansky-Brock's approach in her liquid syllabus offers a powerful starting point. Rather than presenting a one-sided list of rules, create a mutual agreement where you list behaviors students can expect from you alongside behaviors you expect from them. This two-way commitment transforms classroom policies from arbitrary rules into a shared foundation of trust.
You know the old saying: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure., and that is true here as well. When students feel supported and understand expectations clearly, academic misconduct becomes the exception rather than the norm.
Here is a short, introductory video about fostering trust with Academic Integrity from the 2024 Norse Educator's Summit.
Want to explore some more ways of increasing your students’ academic honesty?
Download CETI's Academic Integrity Tipsheet, then read on for tips and strategies designed to foster an ethical class environment, whether you teach online or in person, as well as gentle deterrents that won’t break your relationship with your students before they have a chance to start.
The syllabus templates have the boilerplate language for academic integrity, but you can – and should! – include your own statements that define what it means to be ethical in YOUR classroom. For example, are you sure that students understand what it means to plagiarize? Why not include a link to a definition or put it in your own words? Do you use tools like Turnitin or Lockdown Browser? Explain to students how and when you will use them and be aware of safeguarding against false positives.
Tip: Before using tools like Turnitin or Lockdown Browser, read up on their potential pitfalls and uses, such as this article by Mathewson (2024).
Take every opportunity presented to reinforce academic integrity and ethical accountability. Incorporate ethical behaviors into discussions about upcoming assignments, identify and praise the work (not just the result) and gently encourage more, add statements to every assignment and/or quiz, and remind students about who they want to be. A short, non-comprehensive list of ways you can gently reinforce academic honesty:
Provide your sources for everything and explain why citations are important and what they do. Show them how to cite in your preferred style with at least some of the most common styles. Have a workshop for your citations in class and have them practice.
If you use images and other teaching content that you did not create yourself, credit them - even if it's from an open source!
And finally, whenever possible, create and use your own work. For example, rather than using the textbook's provided resources, create your own and add your own voice, style, and flair. Create your own short lecture videos rather than using another faculty member's videos - even if they say the same thing. If you can't do that, at least offer some intro text and an explanation of why you chose that video instead of doing your own. After all, they want you to be the expert and they are paying for your course - not someone else's.
"There are always going to be social, personal, and individual pressures on us that cause us to do things that either we didn't realize were wrong, or that we perfectly well know that are wrong, but that in that moment seem like a reasonable trade off to our behavior."
-David Rettinger, 2025 - Teaching with AI Podcast #568
When academic dishonesty occurs, you will have more success with students when you focus on understanding the root cause rather than rushing to punishment.
CETI's instructional design team is here to help you come up with some targeted prevention strategies, but read below for some common scenarios with targeted solutions:
Possible Cause: the student doesn't understand what constitutes plagiarism in your discipline or class.
"But my other professors don't require this..."
Solution 1: Schedule an individual meeting to review proper citation and provide discipline-specific examples.
Solution 2: Require student to connect with the Writing Center either to rewrite this assignment and/or for the next assignment.
Prevention: Provide a workshop or a recorded tutorial that students can use to learn how to properly attribute and credit work.
Possible causes: Confusion about acceptable AI usage in the course or lack of confidence in their own abilities; working on assignment last-minute.
Solution: Break down assignment into deliverables that include an outline, a rough draft, and workshopping or peer review. Require them to hand in the rough draft with revision history and/or track changes on to demonstrate what they have changed and learned.
Prevention: Using the resources on the AI page, develop a clear AI class policy with specific examples, demonstrate appropriate AI assistance vs. replacement of learning. Use the AI Stoplight symbols in your syllabus and throughout your course assignments to designate what usage is appropriate.
Problem: Student gets their answers from another student reading them out loud, or perhaps they are clearly using another browser window to look up the information.
Solution 1: Require student to answer the questions in person through an oral examination or retake the exam on paper in your office.
Solution 2: If student has test anxiety, provide them with another way to show their learning - either through a presentation, a paper, or other project.
Prevention 1: Create question banks and have the exam randomize the set of questions and/or answer order for each student. Have the answers require them to show their thinking/work and how they got the answer, either through an oral exam component, or on paper.
Prevention 2: Set up short essay exams and allow students to choose from a larger number of questions (for example, 2 out of 3, or 4 out of 5) so they can feel confident about their ability to succeed.
You might have noticed that none of these solutions include using Respondus's Lockdown Browser + Monitor or Turnitin's Similarity Checker. While these tools can be very useful, you should consider their limitations. Faculty should never use percentage numbers alone to determine whether someone is cheating, and these tools have built-in biases that can affect who is flagged and how often.
This is particularly true for students who are neurodivergent or have anxiety. Respondus's Monitor, a recording device, is viewing behavior against a standard of "normal" behavior, but what is normal varies widely for every individual. Turnitin is checking similarity against other known resources, but it does not distinguish between common phrasing and more precise definitions. If students are writing on the same topics, the score more increase for those who turn their work in later than others.
And the tools for catching AI are even less reliable with a high degree of false positives. Accusing students of using AI tools when they have not can be highly damaging both to a student's reputation, their motivation to learn and persist in school, and to their relationship with you and other faculty on campus.
If you still feel that they are necessary for your course, take the time to craft both a communication plan with your students on how you will use them, and a plan for how you will spend your time reviewing the results. These do add time onto the grading load; in Monitor's case by quite a bit. If you aren't careful, you may spend hours reviewing the footage.
Use these guides to help you set up and use these tools
Tips and Tricks for Using Lockdown Browser +Monitor Effectively
These resources are great dives into the topic of Academic Integrity:
Students who are stressed out and feel lost are more likely to cheat than students who feel confident about the material. Services like tutoring can help!
Picture from Canva for educators
When students feel like they are part of a community in the class and that their professor cares about them, they are less likely to knowingly cheat or plagiarize.
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Be cautious when using tools such as similarity checkers and monitoring tools to detect cheating. This can cause students more frustration, increase their anxiety, and damage their relationship to their teachers and NKU as a whole.
