Many instructors are frustrated with students using the internet to cheat on homework and other assignments.  This article is an example that instructors and schools are not powerless.  As TCU is showing, a firm position can be taken and something can be done about this problem.  

If this is an issue you face and you would like help addressing it, you might be interested in the following information.

A few weeks ago Expert TA offered an hour-long webinar entitled “Making Students Better Problem Solvers”. Half of the conversation was devoted to the issue of Academic Integrity, the importance of students doing their own work, recommendations about what instructors can do, and what Expert TA is doing to help.

This fall Expert TA is releasing a new suite of Academic Integrity tools that instructors can choose to leverage. Here are some things that the platform will do:

• Help instructors clearly communicate what resources are and are not allowed while doing homework in Expert TA.
• Allow instructors to present students with a page each time they open an assignment, which reminds them of the Honor Code and Class Policies.
• Make it difficult for students to post problems and other materials to the internet in an anonymous manner, by implementing watermarks and personally identifiable information within the problem area.
• Utilize a custom web crawler that looks for any instance of our problems posted to answer sharing websites. We contact the offending site to have them removed.
• Identify students who post problems to answer sharing websites and notify instructors about who is breaking the rules.  

Finally, as a free public service we are offering the power of our platform to instructors, in order to protect their solutions as well.  Instructors can send us their problem statements; our web crawler will include those questions in the weekly search and we will report any copyright violation to websites on the instructor’s behalf.