Cheating and plagiarism have been with us for a long while, but the issues have changed over the years, especially with the recent arrival of LLMs.  Thinking through the issue now can save a lot of time and pain later.

 

Why is Academic Integrity an Issue? 

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Several factors now contribute to problems with academic integrity:

• Students live extremely stressful lives, with many responsibilities and distractions, lots of pressure.

• Technology has made cheating easier and more tempting than ever, especially since it is now much harder to confidently detect.

• Students come from a consumerist culture, always seeking the best product for the least money or least amount of effort. They sometimes bring that to their learning, seeking to get the highest grade for the least work. Cheating is the extreme example of that.

• Many high schools and colleges seem to have given up on enforcing any standards of academic integrity.

 

Preventing Cheating and Plagiarism:

• Clearly Discuss your expectations in class, as well as what you consider to be cheating. Don't assume that students have the same understanding of cheating as you do, or that students understand how to document sources; international students (even graduate students) sometimes have had no experience with documentation. It is important, as well, to remember that the norms of academic integrity are not universal, and many international students who have not spent much time in the American educational system may need additional assistance understanding these norms. 

• Clearly indicate your expectations concerning original work, as well as documentation expectations, on all paper assignments, including drafts, journals, and short reaction papers. It is useful to have students considered poorly documented papers and explicitly discuss where they fail.

• Chose appropriate topics. A long paper, due at the end of the semester, on a topic of the student's choice, has a high chance of being plagiarized. Shorter papers, where students also hand in drafts or outlines, and where topics are specific to the course material, are much less likely to be plagiarized. Recently, instructors have been asking students to turn in the sources they used with their paper submission, with quoted material used in the paper highlighted, to help students to demonstrate that they did their own work. This may perform the double duty of teaching students better study habits. 

• Do not allow some students to have copies of your old exams while others do not (even if the questions are different). Students regard this as cheating and then they feel that since other students are cheating, they need to cheat to level the playing field. Instead, put old copies of your exams on the web where everyone can see them.

• Make two or three different versions of examinations, with questions in a different order on each one, and mix them up so students cannot easily copy from the student sitting next to them. Have students sit in assigned seats so that if there are problems on tests, you will know which students were sitting near each other. In general, short answer exams make cheating difficult, as students then have to try to decipher each other's hand writing from several feet away. 

• When grading exams, put a mark at the end of the student's answer to each question. Otherwise, some students will add more material and then resubmit the exam for a higher grade.  Some teachers actually keep photocopies of exams that they return.

• On quizzes, always include an alternate easy question (with fractional credit) for students who do not know the answer to the main question.  A student who sits with nothing to write is much more likely to cheat than someone who at least is trying to get a few points of partial credit.  This also means that a student who attends but does not know the material at least has some advantage over the student who misses. To put it another way, in a good test, everyone gets something right, no one gets everything right, so even in a quiz, you should be able to get some information from each student.

 

Detecting Cheating and Plagiarism:

• The most common sign of cheating on exams is identical or similar wrong answers. Watch for them, then check seating locations. In order to prove cheating you must be able to show not only a relationship between the exam papers but also that one specific student took the material from another. If you cannot say which student cheated, it is unjust to punish both.

• If a student paper is actually generated by an LLM, there are typically several tell-tale signs: unusual or technical vocabulary, reference to works that you did not assign to the class, false or inaccurate citations, and a bland or generic style of writing. However, it is difficult to prove that a student did not write a paper. One way to avoid this issue is to have a significant part of the paper assignment based on proper documentation. Further, you might have a policy like "papers that include fabricated quotations may automatically receive a 0" or something along those lines. 

• Any paper that refers to a work that you did not assign the class (assuming the assignment is not a research paper) should be suspect. 

• Unfortunately plagiarism detection software, like Turnitin is not reliable when it comes to detecting LLM generated writing. You are better off trying other methods, like having students turn in multiple drafts, have students write part of the paper in class as Abedal recommends (see Resources), have students turn in their notes, have students turn in the articles they used to write the paper, or devising some other way of proving that the submitted written material is their own work. 

 

Dealing with Students Who Cheat:

• Follow your institution's policies, or you may be in dangerous legal territory. 

• Remember, we are educators, not intellectual property narcs. Students should experience consequences and we should maintain fairness to other students who do not cheat, but our primary job is to help students learn. Overly harsh penalties can cause students to focus more on the penalty than on what they have done. Further, focusing on detecting cheating is going to consume a lot of your time Focus on penalizing obvious cases. If you aren't sure, it may be best to let it go a revise your assignment for next semester in a way that might make cheating harder. 

• In confronting students it is sometimes useful to assume that they have plagiarized on a given paper assignment, rather than asking them to confess. So, for example, one rather than saying, "Did you plagiarize?" one might say, "These are the reasons I believe you plagiarized your paper. I am giving you the option to revise/I am failing you/whatever the punishment is".  From TP101's current editor's perspective, the best course of action is to assign the paper a 0 but give the student the option of re-submitting the assignment (perhaps only for partial credit). When confronted in this way, students almost always just confess or merely accept the grade. Many students will then resubmit, but some just move on to the next assignment.  

• In cases where the paper is apparently plagiarized but you aren't quite sure, you can try the "fill in the blanks test." Take a section of the paper and blank out certain technical terms. Give the student a few minutes and ask him/her to fill in those words. If the student didn't write the paper, sometimes s/he will not be able to reconstruct the words used. Alternatively, you could ask them to explain the argument of some source they cite. You should have someone to witness to the results of this test.  

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Using LLMs to teach writing:

Some instructors believe we should be using LLMs to teach students how to write and less worried about policing the use of LLMS. See for example:

Lemanik, Kamil. (2025). "Artificial reviewers: Teaching academic writing with ChatGPT," Teaching Philosophy.

Mouser, Ricky. (2024). "Writing with ChatGPT," Teaching Philosophy, Vol. 47, Issue 2.

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Resources: 

Arapahoe Community College syllabus templates on the Use of LLMs. This document contains several different policies you might adopt in your course on the use of LLMs (David Sackris led the committee that created this document). 

Lily Abadal recommends having students complete much of the work of a research paper in class to help students avoid the temptation of LLM generatd writing. See her "Ensuring Genuine Assessment in Philosophy Education: Strategies for Scaffolding Writing Assessment in an LLM Era," Teaching Philosophy, Volume 47, Issue 2, June 2024.

The September 2007 issue of Teaching Philosophy (30:3) has two articles on plagiarism, "Plagiarism: Philosophical Perspectives" by Richard Reilly, Samuel Pry, and Mark L. Thomas, and "The Wrongs of Plagiarism" by Brook J Sadler. 

Joel Marks, "Cheating 101. Ethics as a Lab Course," Teaching Philosophy  26:2 (2003), 131-145.  Marks combats cheating by using a system of "contract grading" that relies entirely on student self-reports of how many hours they spent doing the assignments.  He believes that students learn more and cheat less when they are trusted and when their work is not evaluated.

The International Center for Academic Integrity has many resources regarding integrity.

 

 

Author: John Immerwahr (served for 11 years as chair of Villanova's Academic Integrity Board)
Update:  15 Dec. 2015 (E. Tarver); 1-12-2026--D. Sackris