Moving Academic Integrity from Compliance to Culture: Practical Tips for Teaching in a Postplagiarism Era

During a coffee break at this year’s Conference on Postsecondary Teaching and Learning, a participant told me they feel frustrated trying to uphold academic integrity now that generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) seems to be everywhere. They said that they felt like they no longer know how to keep the focus on ethical learning and teaching.

I hear a version of this before the start of every semester. Instructors update their course outlines, remind students about the student academic misconduct policy, and hope for the best. When we do this, we treat integrity as a compliance checkbox rather than something built into how a course works. The start of new term gives instructors a chance to do it differently, so let’s talk about how to do that.

Start with the language of integrity. Words like “violation,” “offence,” and “misconduct” set a policing tone before students have written a single word, and they put instructors in the position of enforcer rather than educator. Integrity comes from the Latin integritas, to become whole, so let’s start by assuming that students are whole and complete human beings who already have an internal moral compass to guide them. We can show them how to apply the integrity they already have to their learning at the University of Calgary. We can open week one with a conversation about integrity instead of a warning. Here’s a conversation starter that you can use with your students: what does honest work look like in this course?

That question matters more this year because the tools students use to write have changed. Getting AI writing assistance is now part of how many students draft, revise, and think through their ideas. I call this postplagiarism thinking and it was the topic of my keynote at this year’s Conference on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching. Postplagiarism is a framework built on the premise that collaboration with technology, including writing created in-part by AI and in-part by humans, has become the norm. A related premise matters just as much: students can offload work to AI, but they cannot offload responsibility for it. As educators, we need to be explicit about if, how, and where AI tools fit into each assignment. 

None of this works if academic integrity lives only in the syllabus statement. I recommend the wraparound approach I set out in the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning’s academic integrity guide: build integrity into the course before the term starts. This means designing assignments so students’ original thinking becomes visible, building in checkpoints so instructors catch problems before a final submission, and treating integrity as part of learning, rather than a separate disciplinary process.

I have watched integrity policies fail for the same reason: they arrive after the fact, when the only options left are punitive. Here is where to start instead.

A fall term readiness checklist

• Replace policing language (“violation,” “offence”) with educative language (“expectations,” “practices”) in your syllabus. Check out the Handbook for Academic Staff and Teaching Assistants for more tips on how to use the language of integrity.
• State where and how AI tools are permitted, restricted, or required for each assignment.
• Build a low-stakes checkpoint into major assignments so problems surface before final submission.
• Open week one with a conversation about what honest work looks like in your course.
• Confirm your assessment criteria are documented and shared with students in advance.
• Model the practices you expect: cite and attribute properly in your own course materials.

I think about the person I chatted with at the conference often. Their frustration was not really about GenAI. It was about feeling stuck between historical approaches to teaching, learning, and assessment that no longer match how students learn and write today. The checklist above will not solve that tension completely, but it gives you somewhere to start as we approach the beginning of a new semester.

References

Eaton, S. E. (2022). Student Academic Integrity: A Handbook for Academic Staff and Teaching Assistants. University of Calgary, Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning Guide Series. https://taylorinstitute.ucalgary.ca/resources/student-academic-integrity-handbook

University of Calgary (2019). Student Academic Misconduct Policy. https://www.ucalgary.ca/legal-services/student-academic-misconduct-policy