The move online for the 2020 Summer Term Online Assessment Period will change how we ensure academic integrity. Most students want to be assessed fairly on their learning and work. However, moving away from the exam conditions may create confusion about when and how to use sources and external assistance. Student stress can also increase misconduct.
This document suggests ways to support academic integrity by making misconduct more difficult, making student authorship of work more visible, and by informing students about good practice and encouraging them to follow it.
Many of the deterrence methods discussed below – assessing complex cognitive skills, clarifying tasks, communicating referencing conventions – also support student learning.
Information on using Turnitin, the text-matching tool, during the online exam period is in progress and will be circulated.
The Eden Centre has produced Academic Integrity and Online Assessments: a reminder for students when taking online assessments.
Contact your Eden Centre departmental advisers for further discussion on academic integrity in your assessments.
Adjusting assessment tasks
Design questions and tasks that test for complex cognitive skills, as evaluation, application and original argument are harder to find in pre-existing examples, or commission at a suitable level.
Require students to work with specific sources, for example a particular academic article, news story, a new case study or an aspect of a specific lecture. This reduces the chance of there being pre-existing text suitable for copying. The source should be provided through Moodle to ensure students have access. Please be aware that audio-visual materials may not be fully accessible.
Link tasks conceptually to a previously completed summative assessment, to help to prove authorship (but ask students not to re-use any sections of text they have previously submitted for summative assessment).
Change assessment questions from the previous year to prevent previous cohorts of students from sharing their expertise.
Change the order and/or selection of problem sets to make unauthorised collaboration more difficult.
Adding components which do not contribute to the grade
A brief additional element that demonstrates the students' understanding of its content, perhaps through a justification of which sources have been used, to help show authorship.
Plans or notes to help to show authorship.
A declaration of academic integrity. This can help by encouraging self-monitoring and raising understanding of what constitutes misconduct. This will be part of the 2020 Summer Term Online Assessment Period; students will be asked to read and sign/tick an academic integrity statement when they upload their answer paper.
Spot checks and vivas to help show authorship. Students should be made aware that vivas and spot checks of notes/plans may be conducted and will be used only to ensure integrity, not to contribute to their grade.
Clarifying understandings of good conduct in advance for students
Tell students precisely what types of sources and/or collaboration are permitted or not for each assessment. Send this guidance to students ahead of the assessment and include it on the assessment area. Provide clarity by citing examples:
Students must take this assessment completely alone and not show or discuss it with anyone else.
Students are permitted to look at lecture slides and recordings, their own class notes and any academic literature.
Students are not permitted to: consult any other person about the content of the assessment; allow any other person to edit or proof read their work; submit any ideas or phrasing that are not their own (without appropriate citation).
Students should not include any writing of their own that has been submitted for a different summative assessment
2. Clarify that editorial assistance and third-party help should not be used during the 2020 Summer Term Online Assessment Period, even for coursework. Some editorial assistance is permitted for ordinary summative coursework, so additional publicity on this point may be required.
3. Clarify whether students can reuse formative work, both in terms of the topics/cases/argument and portions of the written work itself. (Allowing students to reuse formative work may increase the proportion of matched text in Turnitin, if the formative work was submitted through Turnitin and added to the Turnitin repository.)
4. Provide a link to your department’s guidance on referencing and citing work appropriately.
Ensuring staff are prepared
Students are not permitted to consult staff members about assessments from the Online Assessment Period. Inform all departmental staff, GTAs, and LSE LIFE of the timing of assessments, and ideally share the questions when released, so that staff do not unwittingly answer student queries relating to the assessment.