Guidelines for Academic Staff on Deterring Academic Misconduct
While Schools can use Turnitin to check students’ submissions, this can’t be the only method used because Turnitin can’t pick up:
- Paraphrasing
- AI-generated content
- Translation from (most) other languages
- Every source – its database is extensive, but not unlimited
Some degree of manual checking will still be needed. Schools should not assign an ‘acceptable’ Turnitin score, as this just results in students making repeated wording changes to reduce their score, instead of addressing their academic practice.
Often, Turnitin will identify sources that you can’t access – for example, assignments submitted to other institutions. While you can ask the institution for access, they often don’t respond. However, remember that Turnitin doesn’t always match text to its original source, and the student at the other institution might also have plagiarised it - so it’s often worth doing an internet search for a few sentences – this might find the original.
Designing Assessments
Detailed guidance can be sought from your SLD Adviser, but consider the following strategies for discouraging plagiarism:
- Change your assessments each year to prevent copying from previous years’ students or from past paper solutions
- Replace learning outcomes that ask for knowledge and understanding with ones that require analysis, evaluation and synthesis
- Create individualised tasks with multiple solutions, to ensure individual effort
- Set integrated assessment tasks where coursework and exams crosscheck and reinforce each other, and advise students that cheating in the earlier tasks make the later ones much more difficult
- Build in tasks that help students manage their time more effectively (e.g. by submitting drafts) so that they avoid panic that might tempt them to plagiarise or use AI inappropriately
- Avoid assignment tasks or exam questions that can be answered easily by AI or by copying from class slides
- Be clear about what’s expected for each piece of assessment – especially where groupwork is involved, or where some AI use is considered acceptable
Advising Students
What to tell students?
Students should be made aware from the outset what the University’s rules about plagiarism and other types of academic misconduct are, as well as any specific requirements or expectations within the subject area.
It should be made very clear to students that these rules might be quite different to those they learnt at School or at an institution in another country, so they need to familiarise themselves with them.
Advise that:
- Direct copying is not the only form of plagiarism – paraphrasing, failure to acknowledge sources, translating from a source, and recycling their own work are also plagiarism
- All sources used must be cited, regardless of their format
- Everything the student submits must be their own work – so can’t be produced by another person or service, or generated by AI
- Careful note-taking is important – copying from sources into notes, and then copying those notes into assessed work, is still plagiarism
- These rules apply to all types of work submitted
Give examples of good practice that cover paraphrasing, quoting and summarising material, as well as referencing.
Remind students that, if they are taking courses in more than one subject or School, there might be different instructions in each.
While Turnitin is a useful tool, students shouldn’t rely on it or seek to identify an ‘acceptable’ similarity score. Plagiarism may still be present in their work despite a low Turnitin score, and lack of identification by Turnitin won’t excuse plagiarism that’s found in their work.
Signpost students to sources of information and support including the Academic Writing Skills Programme, the Good Practice Moodle course, and Student Learning Development
Remind students that the Declaration of Originality they submit with their work is not just ‘box ticking’ - it is a final confirmation that the work they are submitting is their own and that all sources they have used are properly acknowledged. If they are not confident at that stage that this is the case, they should correct their errors and submit late, as it’s better to receive a late penalty than a conduct penalty.
How to provide the information?
Student handbooks – should contain the University’s Plagiarism Statement and can be supplemented by subject-specific information and examples of good practice
Sessions in class or online – the relevant SLD Adviser for your School can help you to decide how best to deliver this information as well as making sure there’s no duplication of effort with what SLD provides
Extra support should be offered to students in a way that doesn’t stigmatise particular individuals or group. Students who would benefit most from extra support may be the ones who don’t seek it out, so you might consider an integrated approach where small formative writing tasks are incorporated into the curriculum
When to tell students?
Information should be given when students arrive, but it’s important that this is not the only time. Students receive an overwhelming amount of information on joining and during induction, so they may not absorb it all. Also, international students’ arrival is often delayed for various reasons and they would miss the information if only given at induction. The information should be given at regular intervals and reinforced by instruction, discussion and practice, particularly before the first assignments are submitted.