Promoting Online Assessment Integrity FAQ

This FAQ is maintained by Dan Hillman at Boston University’s Office of Distance Education. Please direct questions, comments, or additions to him. This document was last updated 24 July 2020.

Introduction
1. Why a FAQ format? Isn’t there a manual?
2. How do I get my students to understand the importance of academic integrity?
Acknowledging Academic Conduct Policies
1. How do I require my students to promise to follow their college’s academic conduct code before they can see course content?
2. How do I ensure that my students understand the importance of giving credit to their sources and how to cite them properly?
Ensuring Originality with Turnitin Feedback Studio
Building Tests to Make Cheating More Difficult
Proctored Exams
Et cetera
1. Where can I go for more information?

1. Introduction

1.1. Why a FAQ format? Isn’t there a manual?

Promoting academic integrity online requires a variety of skills which are not all covered in a single manual. In addition, the FAQ format allows you to see an overview of all the techniques that will be discussed and jump to the question that answers their question.

Although all of the examples in this FAQ will use fully online courses as examples, many of the techniques can also be used for blended or face-to-face courses.

1.2. How do I get my students to understand the importance of academic integrity?

Tell them. It’s not enough for you to just assume that they should understand the importance of academic integrity and behave accordingly. Like everything else in your course, you state from the outset what is expected of them. Some techniques to promote academic integrity are technical, such as knowing how to randomize test questions. Others are psychological, such as letting students know that you want them to succeed and that you will work with them to help them learn the course material. Yet other techniques involve testing, to make sure that students understand the importance of academic integrity and understand how to cite their sources properly.

2. Acknowledging Academic Conduct Policies

2.1. How do I require my students to promise to follow their college’s academic conduct code before they can see course content?

You can set up your Blackboard course so that students must check a box indicating that they promise to follow their college’s academic code before they are able to see any of the course content. In this example we’ll use the Metropolitan College Graduate Student Academic Conduct Code Agreement, but this can be modified to work with any academic conduct code that’s already available online or you can write your own.

First, create an Agreement Item. On the home page of the course, ensure that Edit mode it turned on in the upper right of the page, then go to the menu under the page name and select Build Content and then Item.

In the Name field type: “Boston University Metropolitan College Graduate Student Academic Conduct Code Agreement”

In the Text field, click the HTML button, paste the following, and click Submit:
To gain access to this course, you must confirm that you understand and agree to comply with our <a href="https://onlinecampus.bu.edu/bbcswebdav/courses/00cwr_odeelements/metad/bu-met-graduate-student-academic-conduct-code.pdf" target="_blank">Academic Conduct Code</a>.
I, @X@user.full_name@X@, acknowledge that by clicking the button below, I have agreed to comply with the Academic Conduct Code:
<script type="text/javascript">/*<![CDATA[*/
var link = document.createElement("link");
 link.setAttribute("rel", "stylesheet");
 link.setAttribute("href", "https://onlinecampus.bu.edu/bbcswebdav/courses/00cwr_odeelements/css/conductCode.css");
 var head = document.getElementsByTagName("head") [0];
 head.appendChild(link);
/*]]>*/</script>

The next step enables the Review Status of the Item. This step creates a review button, where students can mark the page as having been read. The code will modify the review button from Blackboard’s usual radio button to a button with a checkmark.

On the item you just created, select the down-arrow menu to the right of the name and select Set Review Status. On the Review Status page, under Review, ensure that Enable is selected, and click Submit.

Note that Edit mode must be turned off before you will be able to see the button.

The second step is to set Adaptive Release. On the Home Page, set Adaptive Release for all items that you want to hide from your students until they acknowledge to academic conduct code such as the introductory video, syllabus, modules, and proctored final exam information. For each item, select the down-arrow menu to the right of the name and select Adaptive Release. On bottom of the Adaptive Release page, under REVIEW STATUS, click Browse… and click the item you wish to hide. The course path to the item will appear in the “Select an item” box. Click Submit.

Credits for this technique go to Dan Harding for the button customization. The use of Blackboard template variables to create personalized honesty pledges comes from David Halpin’s session at BbWorld17.

Create Academic Conduct Agreement item:

Set a Blackboard item's Review Status

Set Adaptive Release so that items are hidden until an item is marked as read:

2.2. How do I ensure that my students understand the importance of giving credit to their sources and how to cite them properly?

Give them a test they must master before any of their assignments are to be graded. Professor Schudy of Metropolitan College made it a policy that none of his students’ assignments would be graded until they had mastered a tutorial on crediting sources and gotten every question on a quiz correct. He has given permission for every faculty member to include his quiz in their courses. The following instructions explain how to import it into your course:

Download the zip file containing the quiz and save it on your computer.

In your course, Under the Course Management menu in the lower left, click Course Tools, then Test, Surveys, and Pools. Click Tests and Import Test. Click Browse My Computer, select the file CreditingSourcesTutorialSelf-Assessment.zip, and click Submit. When Blackboard says “Test Import Complete,” click OK.

To make the quiz available to your students, go to the Assessments content area in the upper left and click Assessments then Test. Under Add an Existing Test select Crediting Sources Tutorial Self-Assessment and click Submit.

Under TEST AVAILABLITY be sure that “Make available to students” is marked “Yes”

The box next to Multiple Attempts should be checked with the option to Allow Unlimited Attempts.

Be sure that “Score attempts using” is set for “Last Graded Attempt.”

Click Submit.

Import Robert Schudy's tutorial on crediting sources:

Make the tutorial available after it has been imported or created:

3. Ensuring Originality with Turnitin Feedback Studio

3.1. What is Turnitin Feedback Studio?

The Similarity Report of Turnitin Feedback Studio compares a paper’s text to a database of archived student papers and academic and commercial journals and publications. This is a good tool for ensuring that students have not plagiarized their papers from one of these sources. It will not, however, detect a paper that has been written for the student by someone else. (That said, it is possible that the paper’s true author may (a) have plagiarized from one of these sources, or (b) have sold the same paper to other students taking similar courses all over the world.

There may be no honor among thieves, but even someone who sells papers online has to decide whether it’s worth the risk to lose a customer by selling a paper which could be detected as having been plagiarized from a journal or which may have been added to the Turnitin database.

3.2. How can Turnitin keep my students from plagiarizing?

It's better to prevent plagiarism from happening than dealing with it later. The University of Alabama recommends that the following be included in syllabi for courses that will use Turnitin Feedback Studio:

The University of Alabama is committed to helping students uphold the ethical standards of academic integrity in all areas of study. Students agree that their enrollment in this course allows the instructor the right to use electronic devices to help prevent plagiarism. All course materials are subject to submission to Turnitin.com for the purpose of detecting textual similarities. Assignments submitted to Turnitin.com will be included as source documents in Turnitin.com’s restricted access database solely for the purpose of detecting plagiarism in such documents. Turnitin.com will be used as a source document to help students avoid plagiarism in written documents.

If you add something similar to your own syllabi, you will have warned your students that their work will be checked for originality. That warning may be enough to save yourself hours of headache and grade appeal committee meetings.

3.3. How do I create a Turnitin assignment?

In the course in which you wish to create the assignment, open the content area in which you wish to have them. It may already exist and be called something like Assignments. (You can also create a new content area if it makes sense.)

Click Assessments at the top of the content area and select Turnitin Assignment. (If you do not see Turnitin Assignment as an option, you will need to enable Turnitin Studio for the course. To do this in your course, go under the Course Management menu in the lower left, click Course Management then Customization and then Tool Availability and select “Turnitin Assignment List, Turnitin Assignments by Groups, and Turnitin Basic Tools.”)

Select your assignment type. Most papers will be “Paper Assignment.” Click Next Step.

Give the assignment a title where it says Assignment title, such as “Assignment 1.” Hint: To avoid confusion and lots of student questions, be sure the title you enter matches what this assignment is called throughout the course.

Give the assignment a point value where it says “Point value.”

Start date: This is the date and time when students can begin to submit the assignment. We usually set this to the launch time of the course.

Due date: The date and time that students’ papers are due. Again, be sure this matches what it says in the syllabus.

Post date: This is when students can begin to see instructors’ feedback on the assignment. We recommend that this date and time be late enough so that all students will have submitted their assignments and, ideally, that all faculty feedback has been entered.

There are more options, but by default is fine.
Click OK and then click OK again.

Create a Turnitin assignment in Blackboard:
         

Show uploaded Turnitin assignment from a paper that is made by plagiarizing a paragraph from the first three Google results:

3.3. Where do I see my students’ Turnitin assignments?

Go under the Course Management menu in the lower left, click Control Panel then Course Tools and then click Turnitin Assignments. To view student submissions, click Title.

3.4. How do I see the Turnitin Originality Report?

Go under the Course Management menu in the lower left, click Control Panel then Course Tools and then click Turnitin Assignments. To view student submissions, click Title then click the title of the paer you wish to examine.

On the right side of the paper is a column of icons:

The similarity layer is the middle group of icons.

The first icon (the top one in the group) toggles the Similarity Layer on and off. When it is on, every phrase of the submitted assignment that exists in the Turnitin database will be highlighted with a link to the paper that has used these words before. If you toggle it off, you will just see the paper in its original form.

The second icon, which will contain a number, is the Match Overview icon. The number indicates the percentage of the paper which is similar to something that exists somewhere else. If you click this icon, it will give a list of where elements of the assignments have appeared before, and what percent of the assignment are represented by them.

Click the third icon, All Sources, to display all of the sources that match the assignment, sorted by highest to lowest percentage.

The fourth icon controls Filters and Settings. Click this to exclude elements. For example, you can use it to exclude text inside quotation marks, references in a bibliography, or sources that are less than a certain number of words or percentage of the assignment.

The fifth icon displays Excluded Sources, so that if you set filters with the icon above, you can see the results here.

3.5. Where can I go for more information about Turnitin Feedback Studio?

You can learn more about Turnitin Feedback Studio on the BU TechWeb site.

3.6. Where can I go for more information about Turnitin Feedback Studio?

4. Building Tests to Make Cheating More Difficult

4.1. How do I build a test?

Under the Course Management menu in the lower left, click Course Tools, then Tests, Surveys, and Pools. Click Tests, then the Build Test button. Give it a name, fill in the other fields if you wish, and submit. This is your empty test. Looks like a good place to put a question set.

4.2. What is a question set?

A question set is a randomized set of questions. For example, you could link 30 questions from a pool to a question set, and then have the question set present each student with 20 randomly selected questions from the 30 in random order, and that each one should be worth 5 points. A question set that displays its number of total questions is the same as just putting individual questions in a test, but they will be randomized in order of presentation (and you can assign the point values all at once).

4.3. How do I make a question set?

In the test (what Blackboard calls a Test Canvas) hover over the Reuse Question menu and click Create Question Set. A window will pop up displaying the questions in your pool. Use the Browse Criteria section to narrow the presented questions. If you set up categories and keywords, you can select your items using them here. As you select questions, the count of selected questions will be displayed in the lower left of the popup window, so you’ll know if you’ve gotten the right number. Click Submit.

Back at the test, inside the question set, you’ll see the number of total questions in the set, the number of questions to display, and on the right where no one ever sees it, the points per question. You can change the last two things by clicking on them and changing their numbers. To use the previous example, you could have put in 30 questions, but only display 20, and make each worth 5 points.

4.4. Can I have more than one question set in a test?

Yes. You can have different question sets for different point values. Some professors like to have 10 question sets, each with three possible questions, each of which displays a single question worth 10 points. This ensures that everyone gets a unique collection of questions for a total of 100 points.

4.5. Can I use question sets and single questions?

Yes. This is useful in situations when you want to ensure that all students must answer a particular question. To add a single question to a test, hover over the Reuse Question menu and click Find Questions. Select a question(s) like before.

4.6. Any more tips?

If you look upper left of the test, it will give you the total points that your test is worth based on your settings. Use this as a quick check that the number questions and their values are correct. For example, if you’ve added that 0-point-essay question where students can submit comments about the test and wondering why your test seems to be worth 110 points, check the value of that question.

More information about setting up Blackboard is available in the Office of Distance Education Blackboard Test FAQ and BU's TechWeb sites.

5. Proctored Exams

5.1. What are proctored exams?

A proctored exam can consist of several elements (a) ensuring that the person taking the exam is actually the student, (b) ensuring that students don’t use additional materials than are allowed for the exam, or (c) ensuring that the student taking the exam isn’t receiving help from anyone else to answer the questions.

Proctored exams are only allowed if required to meet accreditation or other critical requirements and after receiving written approval from a Remote Teaching Coordinator or another designee of your Dean.

Proctored exams require setting exam parameters weeks in advance

All exams must be the same, no “special orders” (adding extra time for certain students is okay)

Students show ID to the proctor, show their testing area with their webcam, log into the exam, and are videotaped taking it

Anything fishy is flagged and shown to the faculty

5.2. What is the easiest way to do proctored exams?

If your program is working with the Office of Distance Education, not only will we offer student and faculty support for your course, but we will take care of the paperwork for having proctored exams.

If not, see https://digital.bu.edu/remote-teaching-at-bu-online-exam-proctoring/ for more information.

5.3. How can I do proctored exams on the cheap?

Treat it like a synchronous in-class exam and have all of the students log into Zoom or other videoconferencing tool. Faculty watch and record students. The main disadvantage to this is that students must be available to take the exam when faculty are available to proctor.

6. Et cetera

6.1. Where can I go for more information?

There are courses offered by MET College on topics such as Using Blackboard Assignments Tools (Blackboard & Turnitin), Quiz Question Sets and Randomization in Blackboard, Group Assignments and Peer Assessment in Blackboard, and Deploying, Submitting and Grading Tests in Blackboard .