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Misconduct Investigation Tools

A listing of some useful tools for investigating for academic misconduct.

Authored by Kevin Jia, PTF Engineering Science - contact k.jia@auckland.ac.nz. Updated by Vladislav Sorokin, Senior Lecturer, Faculty Academic Integrity Advisor, v.sorokin@auckland.ac.nz 

Google!

Google can find instances where assignment / online test questions have been posted to websites like Chegg or CourseHero. 

By searching for specific strings of your assignment questions in quote marks, you can find such instances and start takedown processes. Follow the procedure outlined in the Student Academic Conduct Statute. And lodge the case into Academic Integrity Management System (AIMS). 

Do note that Chegg no longer provides account/IP information. However, on specific request, they will provide the 'expert' solution, which gives you a way into identifying students who used Chegg solutions.

Windows Explorer - Author Fields

The author metadata in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and some Adobe PDFs can be a very easy and useful way of finding students who send files to each other.

To see the author field in Windows Explorer, right click in the header row, and then select the author field.

Author Field.png

 

This gives the following, which we can sort by author and visually compare (by scrolling or sorting to see if there are multiple students with the same author):

Author Field Example.png

 

Adobe Acrobat no longer provides this automatically for PDFs, but a tool is available to enable these fields: PDF Property Extension Links to an external site.

Search within Office and PDF documents

Windows' built-in Indexing Service can be used to search for strings within Word/Excel/PowerPoint and typed PDF documents, which can identify students who have shared answers on Discord / Facebook Chat / WeChat etc.

  1. Download the relevant documents from Canvas / Inspera / other platform. Extract the documents into a folder. 
  2. In the Windows Start Menu, search for "Indexing Options"
  3. Click on the Modify button on the bottom right, and select the folder of interest by ticking the box.
  4. Wait for 5-10 minutes to allow Windows to do the indexing, and then use Windows Explorer to navigate to the folder.
  5. Type the unique strings of interest into the Windows Search box;
    Windows Search.png

 

IP Check Reports (via Canvas)

This Excel Workbook Macro will output a spreadsheet with a list of students working from the same non-UOA IP address. This can be used to identify students who are potentially collaborating on an online exam in the same physical location.

Although this is not exported from Inspera, this approach has been successfully used to identify misconduct in 2022 S2.

See the full instructions here: IP Frequency Checks on Canvas

 

More information about Promoting academic integrity and Academic integrity guidelines for course design can be found here.