Academic integrity: staff guide to UCL’s online course for students

How to support your students to recognise and avoid plagiarism and other academic misconduct.

This guide complements the UCL online course for students:

• Introduction to academic integrity (in Moodle)

Produced by Nicola Brown (IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society), the guide provides you, as a member of UCL staff, the background and context as well as further resources to learn more about academic integrity.

It is intended to provide ideas and stimuli for how you could use the online module in conjunction with activities in classes, seminars and/or lectures.

This guide is meant to offer you useful ideas and a starting point for further developing awareness of how teaching academic integrity and prevention of breaches to academic conduct may be embedded in everyday practices.

The Moodle course is based on a plagiarism prevention workshop. You can access the original teaching materials through the open educational repository.

Download the full guide (accessible word document)

Contents of the guide

1. The rise of plagiarism, essay writing mills and other forms of academic misconduct: including experiences of academic misconduct at the IOE and The UK Quality Assurance Agency review of academic integrity
2. Teaching students about academic misconduct: often students are not aware they are doing something wrong. This explores some of the scenarios.
3. How to support the Moodle course in the classroom: when to use the online module and supporting activities in the classroom for each section of the course.

Academic support sources for your students

Library services

• LibrarySkills @ UCL Provides face-to-face and online training and support for library skills and information literacy development.
• Subject support in the library Support for subjects, including guidance about classification schemes, book and journal collections, online resources, AV material, other libraries and training they provide.
• Research Support Provides a number of services and resources to assist UCL students and staff with research projects.
• Skills in Seconds A series of short films introducing print and online resources available from UCL Library Services.
• Guides and e-learning Guides and online support material to provide introductory information to enable staff and students to use UCL's libraries and online resources.

Online learning

• Introduction to academic integrity - Moodle course this guide refers to.
• Plagiarism and Academic Writing for Students This is a moodle course that is accessible via the "student help" tab on the top of the moodle home page, and contains information about referencing, Turnitin, academic skills etc.

Workshops and short courses

• UCL Academic Communication Centre shows what support is available to students in each faculty.
• Centre for Languages and International Education (CLIE) Offers a range of degree preparation and foundation courses as well as courses in academic English, for example.
• Academic Writing Centre Provides support for IOE students in the form of workshops and short courses (face to face and online), one-to-one tutorials (face to face, Skype or phone), online discussion forums, and online resources. Sessions and resources are specifically designed to support Academic Writing in Education studies.
• Students' Union UCL Academic advice guides to help students understand UCL’s policies and procedures.

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Resources

Plagiarism

• Baugh, J., Kovacs, P., & Davis, G. (2012). Does the computer programming student understand what constitutes plagiarism. Issues in Information Systems, 13(2), 138-145.
• Helgesson, G., & Eriksson, S. (2015). Plagiarism in research. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 18(1), 91-101.
• Hollins, T. J., Lange, N., Dennis, I., & Longmore, C. A. (2016). Social influences on unconscious plagiarism and anti-plagiarism. Memory, 24(7), 884-902.
• Williams, K., & Davis, M. (2017). Referencing and understanding plagiarism. Macmillan International Higher Education.
• Yadav, S., Rawal, G., & Baxi, M. (2016). Plagiarism-A serious scientific misconduct. International Journal of Health Sciences and Research, 6(2), 364-366.
• Zhang, Y. H. H. (2016). Against Plagiarism: A Guide for Editors and Authors. Switzerland: Springer.

Contract cheating

• Curtis, G. J., & Clare, J. (2017). How prevalent is contract cheating and to what extent are students repeat offenders?. Journal of Academic Ethics, 15(2), 115-124.
• Dawson, P., & Sutherland-Smith, W. (2018). Can markers detect contract cheating? Results from a pilot study. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 43(2), 286-293.
• Lancaster, T., & Clarke, R. (2015). Contract cheating: the outsourcing of assessed student work. Handbook of Academic Integrity, 1-14.
• Lancaster, T., Robins, A., & Fincher, S. (2019) Assessment and Plagiarism. In: Fincher, Sally and Robins, Anthony (eds.). The Cambridge Handbook of Computing Education Research. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp. 414-444.
• Rowland, S., Slade, C., Wong, K. S., & Whiting, B. (2018). ‘Just turn to us’: the persuasive features of contract cheating websites. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 43(4), 652-665.

Practical toolkits and workshop materials

• Brown, N. & Janssen, R. (2019). Workshop materials for the preventing plagiarism workshop.
• Brown, N., & Janssen, R. (2017). Preventing plagiarism and fostering academic integrity: A practical approach. Journal of Perspectives in Applied Academic Practice, 5(3), 102-109.
• Gallant, T. B., George, V., Jamieson, M., Kanani, M., Lang, C., Moriarty, C., & Usdansky, M. (2016). Institutional Toolkit to Combat Contract Cheating. 

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This guide has been produced by Nicole Brown, IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, via the UCL Arena Centre for Research-based Education. You are welcome to use this guide if you are from another educational facility, but you must credit the IOE.