How can instructors handle cheating when they think someone else wrote a student’s paper?
First of all, be proactive. Include an academic honesty policy in your syllabus and explain it to students. Also, design assignments that will not welcome cheating. Ask for initial parts of the assignment (i.e., topic proposal, outline, annotated bibliography, drafts, etc.) as students work. This requires that students do their own work. If the same term paper has been assigned in Psychology 100 for five years in a row, some “oldies” with new names are likely to surface. Also, if a topic is very broad—a paper on anything in the field—it is easy to find something to submit that may not be original or intended for that course. Change and focus topics to avoid such misconduct. If instructors do not have any out-and-out proof of plagiarism or ghostwriting, they are quite limited as to what they can do legally. They can talk with the student in question and ask them how he or she decided on the topic or found the references to determine if the suspicions are warranted, but unless this provo
