Building Classroom Trust with Technology: Create an Honor Contract to Support Academic Honesty

Introduction: Two Approaches to Academic Honesty

At the University of Chicago, each incoming first-year student receives a copy of Charles Lipson’s book Doing Honest Work in College. Much more than a symbolic gift, this is a reminder that academic honesty is vital if students are to learn and develop themselves to their fullest potential. Yet, in an age when shortcuts abound – from problem set solutions available online to large language models like ChatGPT that can generate plausible-sounding text at the touch of a button – it’s no surprise that many faculty and instructors worry about dishonest behavior on the part of their students.

So, what is to be done? One possible approach focuses upon detection and punishment. This approach emphasizes tools such as lockdown browsers, proctoring software, and AI text detectors, in the hope that those tools can ferret out misconduct and “flag” it for the instructor.

Such an approach can certainly be defended. There are instances in which students simply must not cheat, and in which detecting misconduct is vital – no one wishes to be treated by a surgeon who passed their exams through ChatGPT, after all. And yet, surveillance tools come at a cost: relying on them heavily can create an atmosphere of tension, even of distrust, in the classroom environment, as students feel the instructor is there to “catch” them rather than to facilitate their learning.

It is here that another approach to the misconduct problem may be of value. This second approach seeks to head cheating off at the pass, as it were, by instilling in students a sense of commitment to academic honesty before they embark on their learning journey. At some institutions, this takes the form of an elaborate honor code that all members of the student body must swear to uphold, and indeed, many studies on academic integrity suggest that academic misconduct rates are lower where such codes are present.

In this post, we invite you to consider setting up an “honor contract” in your course. This can be thought of as an honor code in miniature, laying out, in forthright terms, your expectations for how students should conduct themselves when completing their work. Your students can then give their assent, committing themselves to doing honest work throughout your course while reducing the ambiguities and “gray areas” that can lead to unintentional misconduct.

Write an Honor Contract

The text of your contract can be as simple or as elaborate as you wish. A basic contract might read thus:

I hereby attest that all work I submit is my own. I will not use unauthorized resources to complete my assignments, and I will not collaborate with others on assignments unless it is explicitly permitted by the instructor.

You might also include other, more explicit attestations – e.g. what constitutes dishonesty for specific assignments in your course, or what policies on generative AI use you expect your students to abide by.

Set Up an Honor Contract in Canvas

There are multiple methods you can use to implement your honor contract in your Canvas course site.

Implement an Honor Contract with Pages and Modules

If you’re using Modules in your Canvas course site, one way to set up an honor contract is to make a Canvas page with the text of your honor contract, then add it to a module.

1. Create a Canvas page and paste the text of your honor contract into it.
2. If you wish, mark the page as To Do and specify a date and time for completion. This will add the page to your students’ Canvas calendars.
   
3. Add the course page to the first module in your course. This may be a housekeeping module that contains course guidelines, resources for students, and the like, or it may simply be the first week/unit of the course.
4. If you wish, move the course page to the top of the module. You can do this by clicking the column of three dots opposite the page and selecting Move To → At the top, or by dragging and dropping the page within the module.
5. Opposite the name of the module, click Edit to open the Edit Module Settings dialog box.
6. Click +Requirement to add a new requirement for module completion.
7. Under Content, choose the page name from the first drop-down menu and Mark as done from the second drop-down menu, then click the maroon Save button.
   
8. Students who view the module will then see that they must mark the page as done to complete the module. Marking it as done will constitute their attestation that they have read and will abide by the contract.

Implement an Honor Contract with Annotation Assignments

Another method, which you can employ whether or not your course uses Modules, is to have your students sign the honor contract and submit it as an annotation assignment.

1. Type out the contract, leaving a line or other space at the bottom for a signature.
2. Save the file as a Word document (.docx) or image file (.png, .jpg).
3. Following the steps outlined in our blog post on annotation assignments, create an annotation assignment using the file you have created and assign it to your students. (You can check the Do not count this assignment toward the final grade checkbox if you wish.)
4. Each student will then annotate the file with their signature and submit it.
5. You can use Canvas SpeedGrader to view the submissions and ensure that all students have signed the contract.

Implement a Video Contract with Panopto and Canvas

Finally, either in lieu of or in addition to the methods outlined above, you can implement a “video contract” using the Canvas-Panopto integration.

1. Record a video of yourself in which you explain the standards of academic honesty your students must follow. You can either record this video directly in Panopto or record it with a software tool of your choice and then upload it to Panopto later.
2. Indicate at the beginning of the video that by watching it to the end, students are affirming they will abide by your terms.
3. Following the steps outlined in the article How to Use a Panopto Video as a Canvas Assignment, create a Panopto assignment in Canvas and grade it by percent viewed. Alternatively, you can place a multiple choice quiz at the end of the video: “I affirm that I will abide by these terms: Yes/No”
4. You can then use the Canvas Gradebook to see who has watched the video to the end, or who has answered “Yes” to the in-video quiz.

Reinforce the Honor Contract with “Nudges”

Following a suggestion made by David A. Rettinger and Tricia Bertram Gallant in their book The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI, you can reinforce the honor contract with your students via gentle “nudges” throughout the course. For example, you might add a question at the end of each Canvas Quiz in which students re-affirm that they completed the quiz honestly. You might also place the relevant text from the honor contract in the prompt for each Canvas assignment, e.g. “By submitting this assignment, I attest that…” These may seem like small things, but they can help to keep the notion of academic integrity at the front of your students’ minds and contribute to an environment of greater honesty and trust in your classroom.

Share Your Classroom Community Stories

We’d like to hear from you! Are you using technology to cultivate a sense of community and trust in your classroom? If so, how’s it going? Please use our Contact Us form and tell us all about it!

(Cover Photo by Cytonn Photography on Unsplash)