Faculty information

In your capacity as an instructor, you play a crucial role in inducting students into an ethical and scholarly community. By providing them with helpful learning tools and resources, you can help prevent plagiarism, cheating, and other unethical academic behaviours.

Listed below are some best practices to support academic honesty in your classroom.

Clearly state your expectations at the beginning of class: 

• Explicitly state your expectations in the syllabus by using the sample syllabi statements. 
• Share with students your expectations around assessed work and provide guidelines for ethical group work if applicable. One of the best things you can do is communicate regularly with your students about what you are trying to achieve, especially as we are largely teaching and learning remotely.
• The Academic Integrity website has an engaging two minute video that can be played in class or embedded in Canvas to summarize the types of acts that are prohibited

Embed resources for students into your course syllabus/canvas course when writing assessments are used:

• The Online Plagiarism tutorial and the new Academic Integrity tutorial from the Library can be embedded in Canvas.
• Refer to free study skills/ writing workshops through the Student Learning Commons.
• Provide students an alternative to private “editors” that might misrepresent the amount of work completed by the student by referring to WriteAway, which is an SFU approved, 100% online writing support service for undergraduates.
• Inform students that if they find themselves struggling with health challenges that they need to SFU Health and Counselling is a useful resource. Any request for an academic concession from their instructor should be accompanied with an academic concession self declaration form. Instructors have discretion about how to respond to requests for academic concession but must exercise that discretion reasonably and fairly.