5 free solutions

COPYRIGHT © 2011. Digital Proctor Inc. | CONFIDENTIAL AND PROPRIETARY | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

5 Tactical Solutions to Reduce Academic Dishonesty


Solution #1 – Metadata, the Free Originality Checker

• Hidden within every Microsoft Word

document is a free originality checker,

called “metadata”?

• Metadata is simply “data about data”

o Name of the original author

o Name of previous authors

o When the document was created

• Access the metadata by right-clicking on

the student’s document and clicking on

properties

1

Click


Solution #1 – Metadata, Original Creation Date

• Inside every essay uploaded by students,

faculty members can easily find out when

the document was originally created

• Imagine you are teaching a History course

this semester and you see that an essay

submitted by a student was created

almost 2 years ago!

• Recycled papers are a common form of

plagiarism

2

Click “Details”


Solution #2 – Metadata, Check for Multiple Authors

• If the document was last worked on by a

different author, you can check the “Last

saved by” row

• More often, all authors of the document

will appear on the “Authors” row

• Another metric to check out: Total editing

time (a 10 page essay shouldn’t take 5

minutes to complete!)

3


Solution #3 – Leverage Discussion Boards

4

Leveraging the discussion board component has many benefits, such as increasing student

engagement, improving retention rates, and also provides some free ways to detect if a

student submits inauthentic assignments. (Writing style, tone, grammar, vocabulary, etc.)

Get to know the personalityand writing style of students


Solution #4 – Compare Time of Submitted Assignments

5

• Depending on your LMS system it may be

possible to download reports that will

show the time that students submitted

assignments

• This can help spot potential cases of

collusion on assignments


Solution #5 – All You Have to do is Ask!

6

If a professor makes clear that he disapproves of cheating, either in the syllabus, in the

first class, or at the beginning of a test, academic honesty can rise by 12%*

“Please don’t cheat!”

*Joe Kerkvliet and Charles L. Sigmund, "Can We Control Cheating in the Classroom?", The Journal of Economic Education 30, no. 4, (Autumn, 1999), 331.


Shaun Sims

[email protected]

(512) 921-6138

To find out more solutions for reducing academic dishonesty at your institution contact: