Academic Integrity

Detecting Contract Cheating

  • Prior to grading in Blackboard, download a grade history report from the full grade center to identify IP addresses of assignment submission (submissions to third party integrations such as Turnitin, McGraw-Hill Connect, Pearson, etc. will not record IP address in this report). IP addresses are only included in this report in the downloaded version. https://help.blackboard.com/Learn/Instructor/Grade/Grade_History
  • Get to know your students. Ask them to submit writing samples, participate in discussion boards, etc., so you get to know their writing style and can identify inconsistencies. 
  • Check document properties of files submitted for creation date, time and author (Word, Excel, PPT files). 
  • In Turnitin and SafeAssign, pay attention to very low matches or very high matches (<5% or 30%). 

Watch for:

  • Assignments that only vaguely address required content. 
  • Papers with no in-text citations, mismatched citations/reference page, foreign references. 
  • Papers that quote abstracts or summaries of sources. 
  • Suspiciously high quality writing.