Strategies for Identifying Academic Dishonesty

Review timestamps

Conduct DBAs

Google it

Notice text formatting

Strategies for identifying academic dishonesty

Compare with previous submissions

Analyze language

Check for inconsistent knowledge

Encourage personal anecdotes

Monitor performance patterns

Use Google Docs

Request digital drafts

Review the student's past assignments and discussion board posts to identify any significant deviations in writing style, vocabulary, and overall quality.

Pay attention to unusual language or vocabulary that doesn't align with the student's typical writing abilities, especially in online discussions and written assignments.

Examine whether the assignment contains information or concepts not covered in your course or class discussions, which may indicate the use of external resources or AI-generated content.

Encourage students to include personal experiences or anecdotes in their work, as AI-generated content often lacks a personal touch.

Engage in discussion-based assessments (DBAs) with students to discuss the course content and assess their depth of knowledge and comprehension of the material. Live discussions can also be used to confirm understanding of a topic. For example, a student who did very well on an essay should be able to speak relatively fluently about the topic as well.

Review timestamps in the learning management system (LMS) to determine when an assignment was submitted. This data may help to provide support in determining whether a student cheated or not. For example, a last-minute submission may be an indication of a rushed assessment and confirm suspicious wording you found copied from the internet. As another example, two assignments that look nearly identical and were submitted minutes apart might help to support a claim that the students worked together.

Copy suspicious text from the student’s work and paste it into the Google search box to see if sources appear with the exact same content as the student's work.

Look for unusual changes in text formatting, such as different font types or sizes, highlighting, or background color that may indicate the text was copied and pasted.

Keep an eye out for sudden, significant improvements in writing quality in online assignments, or consistent discrepancies between a student's performance in virtual class discussions and their written submissions, as these may indicate AI use.

Draftback Link

Require students to utilize Google Docs for writing assignments so that you can check the version history for suspicious activity. You might also utilize tools such as Draftback to aid in this process.

Ask students to submit digital drafts, outlines, or rough sketches of their assignments through your LMS. These can reveal their thought process and writing progression, which can be compared to the final product.