Teaching Resources

Required Syllabus Language

Your syllabus for any Smeal course must include the following content pertaining to academic integrity:

Smeal Honor Code

We, the Smeal College of Business Community, aspire to the highest ethical standards and will hold each other accountable to them. We will not engage in any action that is improper or that creates the appearance of impropriety in our academic lives, and we intend to hold to this standard in our future careers.

Academic Integrity

According to the Penn State Principles and University Code of Conduct:

Academic integrity is a basic guiding principle for all academic activity at Penn State University, allowing the pursuit of scholarly activity in an open, honest, and responsible manner. According to the University’s Code of Conduct, you must neither engage in nor tolerate academic dishonesty. This includes, but is not limited to, cheating, plagiarism, fabrication of information or citations, facilitating acts of academic dishonesty by others, unauthorized possession of examinations, submitting work of another person, or work previously used in another course without informing the instructor, or tampering with the academic work of other students. The use of unauthorized/prohibited tools and technologies and the misrepresentation of one’s work, words, results, processes, or ideas, in whole or in part, without attribution, constitutes an academic integrity violation. Accordingly, submitting artificially generated text to gain an academic advantage would qualify as an academic integrity violation if course or assessment policies prohibit use.

Any violation of academic integrity will be investigated and, where warranted, corrective academic and/or disciplinary action will be taken. For every incident, in an undergraduate course, where a penalty is assessed, an Academic Integrity Incident Report must be filed.

University Policy G-9

Once a student has been informed that academic misconduct is suspected, the student may not drop the course during the adjudication process. Any drop or withdrawal from the course during this time will be reversed. A student who has received an academic sanction as a result of a violation of academic integrity may not drop or withdraw from the course at any time. These drop actions include regular drop, late drop, withdrawal, retroactive late drop and retroactive withdrawal. Any such drop action of the course will be reversed. This drop policy may be superseded in exceptional circumstances (i.e., trauma drop). In these cases, the Office of Student Accountability and Conflict Response or their designee will confer with the Dean of the College or his representative to determine if the drop is warranted. https://undergrad.psu.edu/aappm/G-9-academic-integrity.html

Plagiarism/Copying

All work that you submit for grading or academic credit is designed to reflect your knowledge and skill related to the course subject matter. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, all work submitted is to be done on an individual basis. This includes, but is not limited to, all exams, quizzes, homework, papers, written assignments, and presentations.

Plagiarism is claiming work as your own that you have copied from another person, whether that other person knows about it or not. This includes copying from web sites without proper source citation and using homework or papers prepared by current or past students whether working as an individual or working in a group or team.

Best Practices: Setting Expectations, Influencing Behaviors and Reinforcing Accountability

Set expectations about academic integrity by:

• Outlining specific expectations for appropriate behavior in your course and on specific assignments.
• Telling a story that makes the importance of academic integrity resonate with your students.
• Reinforcing that you will hold students accountable and describe potential sanctions for academic integrity violations.

Influence student behaviors throughout your course by controlling learning and testing environments:

• Leverage settings within Canvas: Limit the window of availability for assessments, Set reasonable limits for how long a student can take to complete a quiz or test, Randomize order of both questions and answers in quizzes, Use question pools, Hide correct answers and scores until a test or quiz is closed
• Authenticate the identity of who is completing your assignments
• Use approved plagiarism detection software and other tools to provide feedback on student deliverables
• Continuously refine assessments by taking an iterative approach to assessing students, assess higher order critical thinking, and consider appropriateness of assigning live or recorded presentations to provide an oral defense of work.
• Require students to affirm they have not given or received any unauthorized help on each assignment using the following pledge: “I affirm that I will not give or receive any unauthorized help on this assignment/exam, and that all work will be my own.”
• Make clear distinctions between the appropriate role of collaboration and use of tools, including artificial intelligence, when studying and when completing formal assessments.

Faculty have the responsibility to officially report any academic integrity violations for which a grade sanction or warning is issued. It is critically important to consistently demonstrate that Smeal faculty hold students accountable when academic integrity violations occur.

Responsible use of AI in Teaching

There are a variety of ethical considerations surrounding AI, including bias, privacy, transparency, and copyright concerns. Below are some FAQs that have emerged over the last year, as well as some general guidance to promote the responsible integration of AI into Smeal courses. Please note that guidance and policies will be updated as technology – and our understanding of the impact of technology – develops.

Can I require students to use generative AI to complete assignments?
Faculty can technically require the use of Microsoft’s Copilot, which is available for free to Penn State students and faculty. This particular LLM may be required because, through Penn State’s license, commercial data protection is provided, Copilot is not trained on inputs, and Copilot doesn’t save any chats. Still, it is recommended that faculty provide alternative assessments for students who wish to not use GenAI.

Can I require students to use LLMs other than Copilot?
Faculty cannot require students to create accounts using their personal information for large language models (LLMs) and thereby can't require students to complete assignments using these tools. If a faculty member intends to formally incorporate a LLM other than Copilot into their courses, a courseware request must be submitted and approved.

Are there any data privacy concerns if I upload a student paper into a LLM to assess if it was AI generated?
Yes, there are a number of privacy concerns as well as potential FERPA violations if student work is uploaded into any AI (even if it is anonymized), or any tool, that is not approved as courseware. Copilot’s protections do allow for anonymized student assignment submissions to be uploaded. Note that Penn State recommends against the use of detection software because of its unreliability.

How can I clearly communicate expectations about appropriate use of generative AI in my courses?
Visit eLDiG’s page on Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) for sample policy statements, including prohibiting the use of generative AI, use only with prior permission, use only with acknowledgement, and free use without acknowledgement.

Smeal’s Course Surveys on Student Perceptions

In alignment with Smeal’s commitment to continuously develop a culture of honor and integrity, our college previously incorporated a question into Student Ratings on Teaching Effectiveness (SRTEs) that asked students to rate the instructor’s standards of academic integrity. With the University transition from SRTEs to the Student Educational Experience Questionnaire (SEEQ), this question was eliminated. However, Smeal continues to ask students to share their perceptions on faculty advocacy of academic integrity through an independent survey that faculty distribute in each of their courses at the end of every term. Faculty may submit results from this questionnaire as evidence of excellence in teaching performance during annual reviews as well as self-nomination for the college’s Rise Above Award.