Supporting Academic Integrity

A building on UW Seattle campus during a rainy day

Instructors can have certain expectations about students’ prior knowledge of communication methods-- expectations that may not always match reality.

“Research” is one form of academic work that can be wildly different from discipline to discipline and culture to culture. Working with sources, however, is common across many, if not most, disciplines. Teaching students norms when it comes to citing sources is integral to a student’s ability to maintain academic integrity. You can support academic integrity with the following three strategies:

Emphasize Ethics and Learning Over Grading and Penalizing
Scaffold Big Projects
Make More Student-Centered Assignments

Emphasize Ethics and Learning Over Grading and Penalizing

In an effort to “eradicate” inappropriate AI use through zero-tolerance policies, many instructors are creating cultures of distrust. Also, they are foregoing valuable opportunities to teach students about academic integrity and critical AI literacy. Rather than taking a negative approach, i.e., mitigating AI use through surveillance and penalty, consider a positive approach in which learning communities are built on integrity and trust. Part of this includes having open conversations about how LLMs work and some of the concrete harms they can and do inflict. In Gallant and Rettinger’s excellent book The Opposite of Cheating (2025) there is a chapter describing how we should communicate about integrity to our students. They share several great conversation-starters about why academic integrity matters (pp. 42-43), which you can adapt for your setting. For example:

For our course to work, we have to trust each other. “You trust me to design a useful and engaging curriculum. I trust you to learn and then honestly and fairly demonstrate your learning. You trust each other not to create an unfair environment by cheating.”

Grades matter a lot in our society, but if you cheat to get a better grade, you are also cheating “your own personal and professional development.”

“Have you ever experienced an unfair class or test? Me too. Let’s make sure we don’t feel that way in this class.”

In this age of AI, there are lots skills you need to develop that are uniquely human (and that AI can’t do for you). Focusing on those skills will help you succeed better than focusing on the grade.

Even if you are required to take this class, doing your assignments with integrity will help you cultivate the following skills...

A diploma helps you get a job, but competence helps you keep it (and get better jobs down the line). This is your opportunity to build that competence...

Having a strong, clear, non-threatening course policy on AI and academic integrity is another important element. Better yet, invite student input on this policy, and discuss it not only on Day 1 but at regular intervals, especially when you assign a high-stakes activity. Gallant and Rettinger call these “integrity nudges,” which can also include a quiz or reflection on the class AI policy, or an integrity pledge required upon submission of assignments and exams. In his book Teaching With AI, José Antonio Bowen recommends including some combination of answers to the following questions in your AI policy:

When is AI use permitted or forbidden? Why? Is brainstorming with AI cheating? How might AI enhance or inhibit learning in this class?

If AI is allowed, must students share their AI prompts with you as part of assignment submission?

How should AI use be credited?

A warning about the limits of AI.

Transparency regarding your planned usage of AI detection tools and how that information will be used.

Clear rules about students’ ultimate accountability for their work. (2025, np, ch. 8)

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Check out this databank of over 200 AI class policies.

Finally, normalize (and reward!) getting help. Learning and writing are extremely hard, and many instructors forget to acknowledge this. The challenge of learning is not a barrier, it is the point. Find ways to recognize this, inter-personally and with grades. Depending on your course AI policy, this might look like asking students to submit reflections on how their writing process went—what went well or better than expected, what challenges they faced, and what they did to overcome them. If AI is permitted in your course, you can also ask students to submit “receipts” of their AI use along with their reflections, including LLM chat histories and annotated drafts showing exactly where and how students revised based on outside help (AI, writing center, or otherwise)

Scaffold Big Projects

Probably the single biggest tool you can use to mitigate AI use is to scaffold your writing assignments. Scaffold writing projects have built-in stages that students must complete, usually for credit, along the way to composing a longer or higher-stakes piece of writing. To scaffold is to focus your teaching on process over product, which writing studies scholars have been emphasizing for decades as essential to learning to write.

Think about it: almost none of us sit down at a blank page to write an article or book chapter in one go. We collect data, we take notes, we outline, we read sources, we draft, get feedback, revise, and so on. Staging students’ writing projects makes explicit the importance of process. It also lowers the temptation to cheat because students will have already been putting in the work to build and organize their ideas.

You can scaffold a project in a huge variety of ways, with in-class activities, out-of-class assignments, and/or through student-teacher interactions. Here is a list of scaffolding activities that can be done in or out of class, for even small amounts of credit:

Brainstorm topic ideas

Hold a library instruction session with your subject librarian to learn how to find authoritative sources

Read and discuss examples of the project genre

Co-develop a rubric for the project

Co-create project timelines

Central argument development workshops

Outline, abstract, or introduction drafts

Annotated bibliographies

½ or ¾ drafts

Peer review workshops

If you are teaching a large class, you can lean toward doing most scaffolding out of class, though we always recommend checking in regularly in class, asynchronously, or in office hours over a writing project so students are not left feeling like they must fend for themselves. Also, when at least a portion of the scaffolded work is done collaboratively in class, then relying on an LLM to do the work becomes too logistically difficult to be worth it.

Remember, too, that you do not need to do all of the above on your own. We know there is never enough time! If you have TAs, asking them to help develop assignments and contribute to grading is not only helpful for you, but is a great professionalizing experience for them (see more in the guide For Faculty Working With TAs). Also, take advantage of services offered by the likes of the Center for Teaching and Learning, or the Odegaard Writing and Research Center. These centers can help you develop meaningful assignments that encourage honest, thoughtful work.

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For a more extensive description of scaffolding, along with extended example, check out this page at the Howe Center for Writing Excellence

Make more student-centered assignments

Our final suggestion for teaching with or around AI on your terms is to center students’ identities, experiences, and interests in your assignments. When students’ own ideas and primary research are at the center of a writing project, they are less able to outsource the work. Also, when they are invested in their topic, they will be more excited about doing the work on their own.

Following are a few suggestions for student-centered assignment design that encourages investment and integrity. Again, these strategies neither require nor preclude the use of AI. Whether you ban all AI use or want to integrate it responsibly into the writing process, the following suggestions can help mitigate unsanctioned AI use.

Let students pick their own paper and project topics. According to the Meaningful Writing Project when students develop a complex, meaningful topic after a well-scaffolded topic development process, they will be more invested in this topic. They will care about getting it right. Try this: Integrate students’ first forays into topic development with a library instruction session. Subject area librarians can come to your class to teach students how to use the library research tools, and you can co-construct an activity with the librarian where students simultaneously practice using the research tools and brainstorm/refine keywords for their topic.

Investigate the genre you are assigning before students start writing. What is a business memo? A lab report? A research paper? Why does the assigned genre matter in your field, and what are its key characteristics? If the form of your assignment is more open, help students think through their rhetorical and modal choices—what formats might they use, and why? What tools do they need to learn in order to compose effectively? Try this: Ask students to read several examples of the genre you are assigning (these can be professional examples, anonymized former student examples you’ve gained consent to use, or a combo). In class or as an asynchronous assignment, ask students to discuss some of the features that make the writing effective or not.

Work with more primary sources. Asking students to collect and write about their own data teaches students how to conduct research and mitigates AI use. Data collection can be qualitative (e.g., ethnography, interviews, archives) or quantitative, and can be integrated in lots of different ways with secondary source analysis. Try this: Develop an assignment that works toward the Library Research Award for Undergraduates. Applying for the award requires a reflective essay that incentivizes a careful, reflective writing process. And it comes with a big cash prize!

Infuse ethics and personal perspectives. When ethics are centered in a writing assignment, students are more likely to center ethics in their lives. Ethical issues arise in all disciplines, and centering ethics explicitly is an important element in teaching toward justice. Try this: Punctuate the assignment sequence with regular check-ins about how and whether AI use is appropriate for different stages of the assignment. E.g., is it ethical to use it for topic brainstorming? Outlining? Copyediting?

Re-think hard and fast deadlines. According to Gallant and Rettinger, one reason students cheat (with AI or otherwise) is that they cannot meet the deadline. They find themselves in high-pressure situations where they become more likely to make choices that they would not otherwise make. Try this: Experiment with a “Best by” deadline where an assignment will receive the most thorough feedback if received by X date, but can still be submitted (with less or no feedback) by Y date.

Next Guide: On Grading Writing