Faculty

Instructors have two main roles when it comes to academic integrity: facilitating mastery of the course learning outcomes and then validating the extent to which a student has achieved mastery.

Facilitating mastery can be achieved through many possibile pedagogical and assessment choices, for example: providing students some choice and control; scaffolding; designing meaningful and relevant learning activities; implementing alternative grading schemas; and, flipping the classroom (see Dr. Bertram Gallant's book The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI for a thorough review of the options). All of these choices have the effect of raising students' self-efficacy and emphasizing intrinsic motivation (and de-emphasizing extrinsical motivation), both of which can make cheating the exception and integrity the norm.The Academic Integrity Office recommends that you seek out the assistant of The Engaged Teaching Hub for help in implementing strategies to facilitate student mastery that best fit your course and disciplinary context.

Validating mastery (learning) is the other part of the equation. It's not sufficient that students learn, we have an obligation to validate the learning to ensure that the students upon whom it confers degrees have the knowledge and skills the degree denotes (per associated program and course learning outcomes).

The abilities of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), in particular Large Language Models (LLMs), to produce the artifacts we’ve historically used to validate learning makes the validation piece much more difficult to do, particularly when assessments are completed in unsupervised (remote, asynchronous) settings. You can, and should, continue to do what we've always recommended: clearly define assignment policies and exam rules; establish a regrade policy; and, assign seats for in-class assessments. 

But, faculty should also decide which assessments must be supervised (because they are being used to validate learning) and which need not be (because they're being used to facilitate learning). To help you do that, click here for a document that AIO has created to share our advice for validating learning at UC San Diego.

NOTE: this is just advice. Faculty make the decision of what makes sense for your discipline and course context (e.g., size of the class), but we do encourage departments and programs to think through this collaboratively becuase (as the document suggests) there might be some decisions you make at the course level but also at the program level.

We know that these are complicated times so reminder: the Academic Integrity Office is available for consultation on specific questions or challenges you are facing in facilitating or validating learning in your course. Just email us at aio@ucsd.edu for help.