One good alternative to a final exam can be the final paper, especially in upper division courses. Students have the opportunity to synthesize and personalize the concepts they have covered during the semester. The key to encouraging students to submit original work is in how you structure the assignment. If students are asked to use personal experiences and examples, synthesize ideas to address real-world problems, and explore meaning of concepts in a variety of situations, there is less opportunity for cheating and a richer learning experience. If you follow the links in the Resources section, we share with you strategies for creating an assignment that requires a student to use critical thinking skills to use the information gained in class in new and unique ways - having students make something new rather than searching for existing information. By having students individualize the topic in meaningful ways, it greatly deters the ability to cheat.
One of the easiest ways to check for plagiarism is to run papers through Copyleaks originality checker. Copyleaks is a powerful plagiarism check that rapidly searches online documents to determine if there are matches between what a student has turned in and content on the Internet or other student papers submitted at UVU. If you click the link above, you can find detailed instructions on using this tool in your course.
You can also require students to include an academic integrity statement in each assignment. Basically, students verify that the work that they have submitted has been created solely by them. This could be as simple as something such as, “I certify this is my own work, except where I have properly cited the works of others.” In the article, “Designing Activities and Assignments that Discourage Cheating”, the authors highlight the value of including such statements and give additional examples.
Plagiarism is often misunderstood by students and sometimes they unintentionally misuse information. One method for preventing this is to include a guide on what is considered plagiarism as a part of the instructions for your assignment. MIT provides a webpage, Avoiding Plagiarism - Cite Your Source, that briefly describes what it means to cite a source and what different sources need to be cited. Steelman Library at Southeastern University has created an excellent, short video, that provides an overview of steps to avoid plagiarism. This video is geared toward students so would be a potential resource for improving their understanding. In the Resources section at the end of this page, additional resources dealing with plagiarism are provided.
The previous section discussed how to discuss and identify plagiarism in assignments. Now, we will shift our focus to methods for strengthening your assignments - making them much more resistant to potential cheating. This may require a change in how we approach the development of assignments. Anytime you ask students to use personal experience, experiments, or activities to answer a question or require them to use local, specific, and/or current topics, it requires them to actually synthesize what they have studied in class and use it in unique ways. The assignment should be phrased in such a way that it would be nearly impossible to simply find the information online.
Contrast these examples given by author and consultant, Dr. Jude Carroll, during a presentation at UVU. Her example of a question conducive to cheating was, “Write an essay on ‘smoking and public health.’” Instead, she suggested using, “Find 3 ‘stop smoking’ campaigns. Rank them as being worth government funding because they improve health for a specific group. Justify your ranking, using your own criteria. Explain your criteria using data.” Dr. Carroll referred to these as “two-concept questions.” You provide one concept from class and then they have to “make” something using another concept. She recommends using verbs such as explain, analyze or describe - something that requires them to do some work, just not find an answer.
Another simple technique for checking on the potential for cheating is to have a discussion question where students describe to their classmates what they are planning to cover in their paper and why they have chosen this topic. You can tell which students have selected topics which would be easy to “find” answers for rather than required students to “make” sense of information and synthesize concepts in their work.
You can also ask students to provide artifacts for different stages of their work. This could include a thesis statement, annotated biography or a rough draft. Columbia College provides an excellent guide for scaffolding paper assignments.
In designing the final paper, you can also consider different options for the TYPE of paper students are to submit. You don’t have to use the stereotypical research paper that is often assigned. Perhaps students could be asked to submit a position paper. In a strong position paper, students are given a topic that does not have a right or wrong answer, such as GMO foods. The student would then need to provide a summary of the main arguments of each side - each with a specified number of resources to back up the arguments. Finally, students would write an essay supporting the side that they believe presents the best case. They must include the reasoning and thought process behind their choice and why they felt it was the best of the two sides.
Another alternative type of paper uses the I-Search Paper design. In this model students complete the following:
Lehigh University also has developed an excellent guide to alternatives to the traditional research paper. This website is worth reviewing.
Hopefully, these suggestions have given you some ideas about creating writing assignments for the final that require students to actually synthesize information covered in the class and turn in a product that is richer as a learning experience and provides a better assessment of student mastery.
