This guide provides actionable strategies and resources focused on a proactive approach to motivating academic integrity and fostering learning. Your course policies, expectations, activities, and assignments all play a role in motivating academic integrity. They should be shaped by your discipline and the nature of your course. AI detection tools are not reliable and are not recommended by the CTE.
Determine how your learning objectives and goals might be affected by AI use.
- Identify what skills and knowledge are critical for your students to master without AI assistance.
- Consider how specific uses of genAI can help students achieve specific learning objectives in your course.
- Explain to students why you value your learning objectives, assignments, and approach to AI, and why students should value them, too. What academic, disciplinary, professional, and/or personal benefits might motivate them to complete the work as intended?
- Consider discussing with students the value of friction (and its opposite, fluency and the illusion of competence) in meaningful learning.
Discuss academic integrity.
- Consider discussing a positive definition of academic integrity with your students:
- The International Center for Academic Integrity defines academic integrity as a commitment to values of honesty, trust, fairness, respect, responsibility, and courage;
- Mejía and Garcés-Flórez (2025) define it as “standing before others and with others…to protect the integrity of academic practice and, therefore, its internal goods.”
- Co-create ethical standards for the course with your students. Peer pressure can have a strong impact on cheating behaviors, and a positive conversation is more powerful than preaching.
Build assignments that motivate students to act with integrity.
- Check that your assignments aren’t unintentionally demotivating academic integrity.
- Research demonstrates that students are motivated to cheat when they have a low expectation of success and when learning environments emphasize performance, have high stakes riding on them, and prioritize extrinsic motivation.
- Our students are juggling many responsibilities. Be clear about due dates, requirements, and evaluation criteria.
- Build in natural consequences for GenAI misuse or cheating.
- Group or peer-to-peer evaluation of ongoing work motivates students to complete the work because it adds social consequences if they have not prepared.
- Oral components (e.g., presentation, one-on-one discussion with you, group exam, etc.) act similarly by requiring students to explain their thinking and/or processes in real time.
- Break your assignments into multiple parts (sometimes known as scaffolding) due over time.
- Doing so emphasizes the value of the process over the product and helps you get to know student interests, concerns, and voices.
- If a later piece of work seems wildly different from previous pieces, you can initiate a conversation with the student.
Consider assessment validity and appropriate AI use.
- Use secure, in-class assessments, such as exams, when they make sense. Consider your learning objectives and what you need students to be able to do without access to generative AI tools.
- Provide clear guidelines, structured uses, and ways for students to disclose AI use, connected to your learning objectives. Anecdotally, students report that they will use generative AI in secret when told not to, but will use it in specific ways and only those ways when professors provide clear guidelines and sample prompts.
Finally, we encourage you to reach out to Conflict Education & Student Accountability to learn more about their academic integrity processes and how they handle academic integrity violations.
