Woodmont College’s anti-plagiarism and AI-cheating strategy
In the past 12 years, Woodmont College has helped 320 graduates build a happy life and asuccessful career. Our ultimate goal is to equip our students with the skills and knowledge necessary for fulfilling and efficient work, without compromising their core values. Education can and should be tailored to each individual’s unique personality and lifestyle, aligning with their core values and beliefs. This is why integrity, authenticity, and honesty play a significant role in our institution’s ecosystem.
Woodmont College’s academic integrity strategy
We strive to prepare our graduates for the challenges and opportunities their future careers will present, rather than focusing solely on academic success that is limited by the program and measured by grades. Moreover, we want our students to experience the excitement of their lives now, while learning, rather than delaying it for a distant future. That is why self-paced studying is an essential component of our philosophy.
Our core values are:
● respect towards human dignity, the Jewish way of life, and providing our students with the opportunity to get an education without compromising their beliefs;
● keeping our programs manageable and user-friendly through self-paced learning and a unique approach to grading;
● constant development in sync with the evolving technologies to ensure the skills and knowledge we offer are relevant;
● fostering competent specialists with sharp work ethics, decency, and critical thinking.
Implementing these principles is impossible without maintaining academic integrity and encouraging honesty and authenticity. Here is why academic decency is paramount for Woodmont College.
What is academic integrity for Woodmont College?
● Equal opportunities. Everyone deserves a good education, regardless of their life circumstances. Fair treatment, progress tracking, and assignment evaluation are essential for creating a motivating environment for studying and development. In this context, the students’ original inputs and authentic efforts are the key.
● Honesty and decency. Along with professional competencies, Woodmont College’s approach to education emphasizes the development of graduates’ soft skills and personal qualities. While making mistakes is a natural way to acquire knowledge, academic cheating and violating an institution’s honor code are unacceptable and entail severe repercussions.
● Authenticity. We encourage each student to shine their unique self and develop their talents. Considering critical thinking and creativity to be among the most valuable qualities in the modern world, we expect our students to question the information they get, compare and study resources, and contribute their views and experiences to any assignments they complete. This way, we motivate young people to speak their truth, develop their opinions, stand up for their beliefs, and create original writing pieces instead of copying others.
● Being ready for real-life challenges. Instead of shaping a study-focused environment defined by the number of assignments students complete and the tests they pass, we want the college to be an integral part of the learners’ lives and a step in their careers that prepares them for all the joys and undertakings that come with their work.
● Mastering relevant technologies. In our perception, denying and banning emerging technologies, even the most controversial, is a path that hinders professional development. Striving to foster self-confident specialists equipped for the future job market, we view our mission as implementing modern tools in an ecologically and ethically responsible manner, while teaching students to use them in moderation.
● Providing support. In our experience, academic cheating is rarely based on malicious intent itself. Most often, copying is caused by a lack of time, motivation, confidence, or information. Hence, we aim to reduce plagiarism problems and AI abuse by educating students on the importance of original work and the repercussions of academic cheating, while inspiring them to be proactive and creative. Moreover, we believe that students deserve transparency and fair opportunities, which is why we implement modern tools to ensure objective assignment evaluation and help the students boost their writing skills.
● Individual approach. At the center of Woodmont College’s approach are each student’s personality and needs. We ensure that our learners adapt the study environment to their lifestyle and receive an education that uncovers their potential and enhances their talents. That is why we consider each case individually, including the academic cheating issues, aiming to address the root of the problem and work on preventing the misconduct rather than punishing the guilty party.
Modern challenges
Academic cheating has existed as long as educational institutions have existed. However, modern technologies have taken the issue to a whole new level, enabling students to complete an assignment with just a few clicks. Plagiarism, AI cheating, and AI plagiarism are among the burning issues our educators and students face daily.
Plagiarism
Copying is no news to any seasoned instructor: students have been doing it since the first schools in the world. Free access to the Internet has made plagiarism even easier, as anyone can access a virtually limitless number of sources with just one click. Essay mills and AI-based tools designed for automatic paraphrasing to disguise cheating have made educators’ lives even more complicated.
● Plagiarism is a severe violation of academic integrity, as it is dishonest and unfair to the author of the work and other students.
● Plagiarism hinders progress, as copying from a peer or a book, students do not develop their skills or gain information. So, stealing someone’s work steals, in the first place, from the plagiarizer.
● Plagiarism is disrespectful towards educators, as they spend time and energy on assignment checking and providing feedback, and deserve to put this effort into the students’ development instead of catching the cheating attempts.
● Plagiarism puts the college’s reputation at risk, as publishing non-original papers entails severe repercussions in the academic world. Moreover, the way our graduates perform in their careers is the most obvious demonstration of our achievements, and the questionable work ethics of our students jeopardize our image as an institution and betray our values as a community.
AI misuse
AI technologies have brought a new context to education. They can and should be implemented ecologically and to the benefit of both students and teachers; however, using AI to complete assignments instead of learners is an obvious form of academic misconduct.
● Passing off AI-generated text as authentic writing is an apparent deception and a violation of academic integrity rules.
● AI often produces hallucinations, making the information it provides misleading and potentially harmful.
● AI misuse does not contribute to students’progress and wastes the teacher’s time.
● Using AI for academic cheating misrepresents AI tools and perpetuates biases regarding the technology that can be integrated into the educational system for growth and development.
AI plagiarism
AI plagiarism is a relatively new concept that has emerged with the advancement of AI technologies. Since chatbots do not create content themselves but generate it based on the available data, they often use some sources and authors’ work without attributing them. So, any AI output is plagiarism by definition, and using it raises the same issues as any type of authorship rights and academic rules violation.
Students’role in academic cheating
Without advocating for deliberate cheating, we firmly believe that addressing the root of the problem is crucial, rather than merely fighting its symptoms and consequences. Hence, the reasons students plagiarise and use AI to generate assignments have paramount importance in understanding how to impact these behaviors and motivate young people to respect academic integrity rules. Here are the problems students face the most often:
● Lack of confidence. Striving for success, young people often fear making mistakes, whether it involves expressing their opinions or providing factual information in tests. That is why they find it safer to copy someone’s writing or plagiarize the already- approved source rather than craft an original one. The solution here is to encourage students to provide individual input, create a safe space for self-expression, and demonstrate that their opinions matter.
● Lack of knowledge. Students come from various backgrounds, and many of them are unaware of the importance of writing ethics and originality. Since being uninformed does not alleviate the consequences of plagiarism, we believe that educating on writing ethics is the key to avoiding originality problems and protecting academic integrity.
● Lack of motivation. It is essential that students recognize originality and authenticity as vital values, understand their importance, and be aware of the consequences of plagiarism. The comprehension and embracement of academic requirements as intrinsic values, rather than blindly following the rules, is a key to high-quality work, not only in assignments but also in the future workplace.
● Lack of time. Sometimes, behind the academic rules violation is just panic. When one fails at time management, the only options are to use AI or cheat through plagiarism. This factor is one of the reasons self-paced learning leads to better results, reduces stress, and is beneficial for students’ mental health.
● Lack of understanding. Plagiarism is unacceptable. However, when it comes to AI, the situation may not be as straightforward. We believe that explicit guidelines regarding the extent of acceptable AI use are required for both the educational institution in general and for each assignment specifically, to avoid misunderstandings and help learners shape ethical and moderate usage of AI tools.
● Lack of tools (accidental plagiarism). Unintentional plagiarism occurs when one inadvertently repeats someone else’s thoughts or mistakes someone else’s ideas for common knowledge, or even their own. Anyone can fall into this trap; however, accidental plagiarism is still plagiarism with all the severe repercussions. The only way to catch it before submitting the assignment is to run the text through a plagiarism detector. Such tools help students improve their writing skills, educate themselves on plagiarism issues, and learn from their mistakes even before receiving their teacher’s feedback.
Advanced solutions for maintaining academic integrity
Hardships in life bring new insights and revelations, while challenges in academic and professional domains spark innovative solutions. AI-related cheating has inspired novel approaches to designing assignments to make them AI-proof. It means that nowadaysWoodmont College’s tasks include elements that require creativity and immersion into the subject and can’t be generated by AI: interviewing professionals, recording oneself giving a presentation to an audience, and artifacts like building websites.
However, even the most intricate task can’t prevent AI-plagiarism with 100% guarantee. Which is why implementing a Plagiarism checker has become a game-changer for our college, automating the teachers’ routines and helping students maintain academic integrity.
● Our teachers’ workflow remains efficient, leaving room for inspiration. With fast and easy plagiarism detection, educators can save time on manual source comparison and checking copied assignments, allowing them to focus on class preparation, emotional engagement, and self-development.
● The working process is smooth and convenient. The tool accelerates the checking routine without overwhelming it. Teachers can review assignments directly in the LMS with a single click. Moreover, they can upload their repository to check the assignments against those of other students and previous years’ essays, thereby preventing learners from copying from each other.
● Students improve their skills. Students can check their assignments before submission to avoid accidental plagiarism. This way, they educate themselves on originality matters, avoid constant stress, and learn from mistakes even before receiving feedback from an instructor.
● We implement cutting-edge technologies. Relying on authentic values, we admit that progress is impossible without novel solutions. By introducing groundbreaking tools to our students, we help them find answers to emerging questions, leaving space for what truly matters.
● We support self-development. By utilizing plagiarism detection, our learners can develop their creative skills and explore writing ethics at their own pace, focusing on their ideas and beliefs rather than constantly worrying about marks and tests.
● We protect personal information. Transparency and dignity in education work on bothsides. We respect our students’ intellectual property, and that is why we pay close attention to data protection. PlagiarismCheck.org guarantees that they do not use the texts we submit elsewhere, ensuring our teachers and students are on the safe side.
● Our college maintains academic integrity and a good reputation. We ensure that our graduates are independent thinkers with strong work ethics and excellent professional competencies, equipped to meet all the challenges of the modern environment.
● The PlagiarismCheck.org toolkit also features an AI Detector, Grammar Checker, Authorship Authenticator, and Citation Generator, providing a comprehensive solution that simplifies working routines.
Change is an inevitable and necessary part of any development. Therefore, our task as an educational institution is to equip our students with the ability to adapt to changes and challenges without compromising their core beliefs and values. Here, a combination of traditions and modern solutions is a key that helps Woodmont College guard academic integrity through the years.