Academic Integrity for Faculty

The Conference Board of Canada (2020) specifies working with others on projects and tasks as part of its employability skills list. Group projects, tasks, and assignments can be a good way to help students develop these skills. However, misunderstandings have arisen with who is able to work together, and how or if they can do so.

According to Assiniboine's Policy A25, in general, collaboration means working together when allowed, supposed, or directed to do so.

Examples

• group members completing projects together, assigned by their instructors
• students forming study groups to prepare for tests or exams

Sutton and Taylor (2011) define collaboration as "working together to share information or material that may be included in the final version of an assignment" and collusion as "an unacceptable level of shared work in the final assignment" (p. 832). This is a specific context and understanding which may be useful for instructors wanting a certain level of group work in assessments.

Videos

Collusion refers to students working with other students when not directed or allowed to do so by their instructor, in order to complete an assessment in whole or in part. Examples of collusion include, but are not limited to:

• students working together on assignments that were given individually
• students giving test answers to other students
• students receiving test answers from other students

Policy A25 Collusion Examples

Examples of collusion include, but are not limited to:

• "Working with another student on a small portion of a homework assignment when such work is prohibited.
• Receiving assistance from other students, such as research, statistical, computer programming, or field data collection help that constitutes an essential element in the undertaking without acknowledging such assistance in an assignment.
• Colluding before a test or exam to develop methods of exchanging information and implementation thereof" (Assiniboine Community College, 2023).

The Learning Commons has compiled and delivered extensive research on ways to reduce academic misconduct, including collusion. Below is an abbreviated list.

There are many proactive ways to help students avoid collusion, including:

• discuss collusion and academic integrity with your students
• provide clear guidelines around collaboration in course outlines, syllabi, etc. (Deale et al., 2020)
• specify where "collaboration ends and collusion begins" (Velliaris & Pierce, 2019)
• provide examples of what students can and should do in group work (Sutton & Taylor, 2011)
• offer guidance on best practices rather than only warnings on what not to do (Sutton & Taylor, 2011)
• use Ouriginal text-matching software for written assignments

Ouriginal Text-Matching Software

Ouriginal checks student submissions not only against information found on the surface web and in databases, but against previous student submissions. As each submission is entered into Ouriginal , it builds a repository of student assignments from which to generate text-matching similarity scores. Students who are colluding with former students or current classmates whose assignments are also in the Assiniboine Ouriginal repository may have similarity scores which reflect this misconduct. As always, careful instructor analysis of the score is required.