Best Practices Related to Academic Integrity

Academic integrity is crucial to the reputation of any post-secondary institution including NJIT. Academic dishonesty diminishes our reputation as a high-performance university. It is vital that we, as an institution, do our best to prevent academic dishonesty by communicating with our students on a regular basis and be willing to take swift action when policies are violated. Below, please find a series of recommendations to prevent and address violations in your classes.

This document is organized into six broad categories:

General Procedures
General Classroom Practices
Examinations
Plagiarism
Falsification & Fabrication
Cheating
Information for Faculty
Suggestions to Eliminate or Discover Violations During Virtual Exams

General Procedures

All suspected or confirmed cases of academic dishonesty or misconduct must be referred to the Dean of Students using the online reporting tool (located here) where they will be consistently adjudicated in accordance with the University Policy on Academic Integrity.
Teaching Assistants and Proctors should notify instructors when violations of the academic integrity policy are suspected or observed. Instructors should notify the appropriate person in their department or college, e.g their chairs, directors, or deans.
Anti-cheating/plagiarism measures should be reviewed at department meetings on a regular basis beginning with the first meeting of each semester. This discussion should include educating faculty on innovative uses of modern technology to prevent cheating and plagiarism.
Open forums should be held to address cheating, plagiarism and other academic integrity issues that are trending. Junior faculty are encouraged to attend an open forum at least once each year and could include such participation in teaching portfolios.
Remind Ph.D. and MS students doing thesis or project work that they may be dismissed from the graduate program for falsifying processes, reports and data and/or fabricating research results and/or plagiarizing the work of others in their dissertation or thesis document or resultant publications. For academic integrity lapses discovered after their graduation, please be advised that NJIT has every right to rescind the degree.
Remind undergraduate students involved in research that they can be penalized for falsifying processes, reports and data and/or fabricating research results and/or plagiarizing the work of others in their reports.

General Classroom Practices

The following recommendations are guidelines for classroom procedures. Each instructor, or department, may adapt to his, her or their particular situation.

Have each professor outline, specifically on the syllabus, expectations for the class (including a link to the NJIT Academic Integrity Code). This would include attendance, use of electronics in the classroom (if appropriate), doing one’s own work to avoid plagiarism, rules for taking quizzes and tests, and the consequences for violating any and all expectations or rules. If calculators are allowable during quizzes or exams, the syllabus should state the type of calculator allowed.
Discuss, with students, how each homework assignment, paper, project, presentation or lab will help them learn the material and prepare for exams. Connect assignments to the knowledge and skills that they will use in the future. Present to students appropriate use of publicly available material – such as web sites, open source code, published papers - in assigned homework/tests/projects.
Be vigilant in looking for how students cheat. Once a method of cheating is identified, create a solution that does not allow this type of cheating in the future.

Examinations

Cheating on exams can be either planned (cheat sheets, coded messages, etc.) or opportunistic (happens only because opportunity presents itself). If possible, remind students of the NJIT Academic Honor Code at the top of each exam.

Exam questions should be altered (e.g. by changing numbers) and should not be used more than once every five years. This practice should also apply to exams pertinent to graduate program milestones (e.g. written qualifying exams for Ph.D. students).
Many publisher test banks have been compromised and thus should be used with caution. Make every possible effort to change the questions if using a test bank.
Exams should be altered in a manner that is unpredictable for the students so that students who have seen exams from previous semesters do not have an unfair advantage.
The order of exam questions should be varied for examinees in adjacent seats.
Instructors are expected to take the exam in advance in order to catch errors.
If possible, take time to arrange chairs properly before an exam starts. Students should be separated by at least one desk or one seat if possible.
Implement assigned seating for the students or randomly assign them to a particular seat during the exam.
Before entering an exam room, have students deposit, at a designated area, all backpacks, caps, gloves, coats, notebooks, books, and technology of any kind (laptops, ALL cell phones, tablets, graphing calculators and programmable watches) unless necessary for taking the exam. Calculator use must be monitored closely and only non-communicating calculators should be allowed. Students should receive advance notice of this policy in case they would rather lock up their belongings in a locker or leave valuable items at home.
Practice active proctoring. Walk around the class in random patterns. Proctors should not be focused on anything other than proctoring. Multiple proctors should be present for large classes.
Monitor a student’s need to use a restroom during an exam. Ask them to leave their phone with you (provided it is not already deposited at the beginning of the exam) until they return and permit only one student at a time to leave the exam room.
If cheating is observed or suspected, instructors (or proctors) should report incident to the Dean of Students with as many details as possible. The instructor should be available for the proctor to reach at all times during the examination.
Unless necessary, take-home exams should be given sparingly and not presumed to represent individual work. If the course is online and take home exams are necessary, refer to the Institute for Teaching Excellence (ITE) guidelines.
On each test cover, restate the rules and have each student sign before handing in the exam.
Make-up exams should not be administered unless an unforeseen extraordinary circumstance, such as a medical, religious, or military issue, prevents a student from taking an exam at the designated time. In such cases, validated documentation must be presented to the Dean of Students’ Office. The latter office will inform the instructor about the validity of the document but it will be up to the instructor to make the make-up exam decision.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is presenting, using or attempting to use written, oral*, or graphic work which was authored or prepared by another and submitting it as one’s own without appropriate citations or credits.

* Intentionally or knowingly representing the words or ideas of another as one’s own in any academic exercise.

Examples can include:

Contract Cheating which is paying someone else to do the work.
Using someone’s paper or project from a previous semester, and improper or missing citations.
Copying from a source without quotations and/or appropriate citation.
Copying from any source and altering words or phrases to avoid exact quotation.
Cloning someone else’s ideas without attribution.

Here are some suggestions to eliminate or discover plagiarism:

Use Turnitin.com or similar software to check for plagiarism.
Be especially suspicious of dramatic improvements in writing ability or sudden changes in style or performance.
Instructors should familiarize themselves with websites and other sources that offer to write papers or complete assignments for students (e.g., Chegg, EssayShark, etc.). If students know that instructors are aware of these resources, they are less likely to use them.
Instructors should make sure that students understand when homework is to be done individually (ideally in writing on the syllabus or assignment sheet) and then follow reporting procedures when cheating occurs. Instructors should address ‘unauthorized collaboration” as a form of academic dishonesty,
If homework is expected to be done in groups, allow group submission. An instructor may use random “call-ups” for explaining homework solutions. Clarify what each group member is responsible for.

Falsification & Fabrication

Falsification is the unauthorized creation, alteration or reporting of information in an academic activity by involving fake processes, fake data or fake calculations (by computer or hand).

Examples can include:

Fabricating sources of information such as citing non-existent sources, processes, results, or publications, or including inaccurate information from existing sources.
Intentionally citing the wrong source for your data, methodologies, processes and comparative studies.
Skewing data in your work or the work of others in accord with what you think results should be.
Changing answers after an exam, project, or any other graded assignment, has been returned.
Artificially creating data when it should be collected from an actual experiment.
Intentionally changing manually the results of a computer program (in tabular, graphic or plainly numerical form).
Unauthorized impersonation of another person to complete an academic activity.
Unauthorized use of another individual's computer login ID and password.
Hiding data, results, or information using inappropriate scales, magnification and representation in charts, graphs and other forms of representation.
Falsifying information pertaining to the subjects participating in an experiment.
Unauthorized omission of data, information, or results in documents, reports and presentations.

Here are some suggestions to eliminate or discover falsification & fabrication:

Require lab notebooks and sign /collect duplicate pages.
Spot-check calculations in project reports.
Run the source code submitted by the students for computer programming projects.

Cheating

Many of the above points address behaviors that fall under the definition of cheating. Cheating is intentionally using, providing or attempting to use or provide unauthorized assistance, materials, information or study aids in any academic exercise (in the classroom or outside of the classroom). Likewise preventing, or attempting to prevent, another student from using authorized assistance and/or materials.

Examples can include:

Copying answers from or looking at another student’s exam.
Using or possessing any material not expressly permitted during an exam, such as notes, books, prohibited calculators.
Using electronic devices such as cell phones, digital cameras, PDA’s, data storage devices, computers, internet, or other electronic devices unless expressly permitted.
Having someone else take an exam for you or asking someone during an exam for answers to a test/exam.
While taking an exam, possessing prior tests, notes, materials, or property belonging to or generated by faculty, staff, and students while knowing that their use is forbidden during the exam.
Submission of work done by others.

Information for Faculty:

Suggestions to Eliminate or Discover Violations During Virtual Exams:

Students should complete a practice exam to learn about the mechanics of the proctoring solution being used for the class. There are practice exams for Record+ and Respondus available for students to try unlimited attempts with the technology, without any extra charge to NJIT, in the Canvas Student Orientation.
Please require that students always produce a full facial view of themselves (i.e., chin to forehead). Note that, after the initial set-up, students may not be able to see themselves during the exam. While they may be sitting close to the computer screen for the ID check, they may, understandably, shift positions as the exam proceeds, and would not know how they look through the camera.
Insist that a full and proper environmental scan of the room is done. Students sometimes have more than one monitor in the room. A suggestion is to have them show the back and side walls. There may be information on the walls either hand-written or via sticky notes.
Watch out for roving eyes and nervous body movements, particularly to various sides of the screen. Be aware that some students have physical disabilities or underlying conditions which may lead to spontaneous physical reactions/movements.
Students should not be allowed to wear headphones or earbuds during a test. They could easily access or receive information from external sources. This should only be allowed with a documented accommodation from the Office of Accessibility Resources and Services.
The availability window of an exam can be set to minimize communications and sharing of information among students. They should not be able to access the exam questions before their attempt. Once the attempt begins, the countdown for the time limit begins immediately. If students are asked to scan/upload written work, a strict timetable should be used to minimize the possibility of sharing information. Additionally, using question banks (when possible) so that random questions are pulled for each student, would be helpful.
If proctors observe an issue during a Webex exam session, it is suggested that they do not intervene right away. They should wait until the exam is finished. Note that live proctors are able to intervene when ProctorU Live+ is used. See here for more information.
Whenever possible, design questions that make it difficult to get the answers by doing a web search.
For instructors who use Webex, there are proctoring ideas that can be used to make cheating more difficult, including, creating two angles of view during the exam (e.g., using a phone).