Rubric Items and Riders

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Checklist and Statements for Ensuring Academic Integrity (AI) in Submissions

Statements around academic integrity share clear expectations with students. You can use the points below as a checklist for describing and sharing expectations with your students. You may also wish to  choose a few statements that apply most specifically to your assignments and add them to your assignment description or rubric as appropriate.

For more information or support about Academic Integrity, reach out to the Academic Integrity Office.

General Riders

These general riders can be used as notices within an Instructional Plan, assignment instructions, and/or on eConestoga.

• Students need to reach out for assistance at least 48 hours prior to the due date.
• Individual work and submissions are required, unless stated otherwise.
• If the assignment says someone else’s name, it will not be marked and will be assumed to be contract cheating or unauthorized collaboration.
• All tests are closed book (no resources outside what you know unassisted) unless explicitly said otherwise.
• Assignment dropboxes are preconfigured to automatically close. Any assignments submitted after the dropbox closes will not be entered and won’t be marked.
• Forensic IT investigations can occur checking the IP address, the time spent, and even whether the style of writing no longer looks reliably from you or from one person.
• Sometimes time pressure can cause a student to violate academic integrity. Be sure to ask for an extension at least ___ days before the due date.
• Assignments will be submitted through Turnitin.com. You may remove your assignment from the Turnitin database after submission.
• Assignment documentation, description, or instructions must not be shared with any third-party websites.
• Students are responsible for checking their submissions to the Assignment Dropbox to ensure they have submitted the correct document. Students may be asked to confirm the date stamp of the creation of their original document.

Documentation Riders

These documentation riders can be used within the assignment instructions.

• References should reflect only items you have accessed, learned from, and referred to in the body of the assignment (with an in-text citation to match the references). Using someone else’s reference list is not acceptable.
• Each in-text citation should have a matching reference and each reference should have at least one in-text citation. Don’t try to puff up the number of references and not use each.
• It should be clear to me whether the citation indicates the item is directly from the source or adapted. You need to quote, summarize and paraphrase and indicate which is happening. Visuals need to be clearly taken from a source and cited or indicated as self-created and adapted from data from a source.

Riders Specific to Coding

• If the program does not run or compile, it cannot be graded.
• If the professor has evidence of cheating (e.g., two students with identical code or the same mistakes) you may be asked to complete the coding task under supervision while explaining the steps.
• Any functions or chunks of code borrowed from other sources must be cited. This cannot make up more than ___% of your program or application.

Group Work Riders

Consider using these riders in the assignment instructions or rubric for evaluations involving group work. It would be recommended to also reinforce these with students orally.

I reserve the right to assign different marks to different team members if there is evidence of differential contributions. Each group member will be asked to meet with me and show evidence of attendance at group meetings, contributions of track changes to documents, emails or group discussion posts making suggestions and file creation dates, etc as appropriate to this assignment. It would be unacceptable to say that others volunteered to do all the researching, summarizing or writing. You must maintain evidence of your contribution.

You may also consider adding the following to your rubric for group work:

Evidence of contributions during the preparation process (unique to each group member)

If you are concerned about AI use in group submissions, consider adapting these statements on student use of AI in assessments.

Finally, you might consider having a component of the rubric be connected to a confidential peer assessment of individual contributions. Peer assessment grades should not exceed 10% of the overall assessment grade.