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From everyone in Student Belonging and at The Mosaic, we’re excited to celebrate your achievements and wish you all the best as you begin this next chapter.
Cord Pick-Up Information – Cultural Celebration & Awards
For those who RSVP’d to our Cultural Celebration & Awards but are unable to attend, we are offering an option to pick up your cord next week in The Mosaic (Room 2B23, The Commons, Second Floor).
Pick-Up Times:
Monday, May 19: 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM
Tuesday, May 20: 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM
Wednesday, May 21: 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Cords will be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis for those who did not RSVP ahead of time. If you did not RSVP, you will be asked to provide your name and email at the time of pick-up.
Note: The following tip was shared as part of a 2/18/25 Faculty Development Center workshop, "Encouraging Academic Integrity in the Era of AI." Please feel free to adapt and make it your own.
Given faculty concerns about AI-assisted or even wholly-authored student papers, faculty could use a simple feature in any Google document, spreadsheet or presentation slide: its version history, which includes a summary or detailed date & time stamp of every addition or edit. As such, the goal is not to detect the presence of AI in student writing, which is currently very difficult due to “false positives,” but more so to detect the absence of originality.
Why & How This Might Work
Unlike the iterative, word-by-word or sentence-by-sentence approach of most original writing, students who use AI or plagiarized material are likely copying & pasting entirely ‘in-tact” content as “whole cloth” blocks, perhaps with minimal or even no changes before submitting as a final draft. If so, requiring students to submit a Google Doc for their paper will contain a version history that faculty can inspect. If version 1 – or any version – contains large blocks of text in a short period of time, one can reasonably assume the work is not original. More importantly, if students know that faculty know there’s a version history that can be inspected – and questioned about – maybe they will think twice.
Issues & Opportunities
A student could just try to emulate iterative authorship, copying one word or sentence at a time -- but likely not in a hurry before a deadline, which is the use case most common to plagiarism. Still, the attempt would result in an ironic, self-inflicted penalty, by forcing the student to take time to cheat to appear not to have done so.
Some students may complain that being required to use a Google Doc inhibits their creative writing process or doesn’t show “offline” musings written by hand or in other editors, including notes made on their mobile devices. However, faculty could say the Google Doc version history allows them to extend the conditions for how students are assessed over time on any assignment vs at the same time (e.g., answering an essay question on an exam). Also, all Google Docs have mobile apps.
For faculty who are ok with students using AI – as an aid to counter writer’s bloc or if clearly cited in the final version – a version history could be a “teachable moment” for how, where and when to do so. Students could be asked to “name” their versions as AI or “mine” or add a comment to explain where and why they changed any AI output.
Suggested Approach
Create a Google Doc template you ask students to copy and use for their written assignment. You could even make this a Google Assignment for submission in a Learning Management System (LMS) like Blackboard.
Tell students you’ll only accept their assignment if you are a named editor/collaborator (you need editing privileges to view a Google Doc’s version history).
Tell students you reserve the right to randomly inspect the version history of any Google Doc they submit as their own work. You can also require an oral interview to have students explain any version.
FYI: A sample syllabus statement on use of AI by students is below (source: John Fritz, DoIT):
Using Google Docs to Detect Students’ AI Usage from East Central College
Prove your writing is not AI-generated by tracking changes in your docs: Showing your work is not just for math problems anymore in Popular Science
With increasing AI plagiarism, write your essays on Google Docs! from Reddit discussion amongst students
Why I Use Google Docs to Teach Writing, Especially in the Age of AI blogpost by Steven D. Krause
How To Use Google Docs Secret Feature to Detect AI Content Writing by Digital Information World
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As part of UMBC’s data warehouse migration to HelioCampus, the Data Management Committee’s “Training & Outreach” working group has published a brief (8 min) video orientation on why and how to explore analytics @ UMBC.
Developed, in part, as a response to the 2006 Middle States Self Study, UMBC’s Report Exchange (REX) data warehouse was designed to help collect, integrate, report on, analyze and (importantly) act on data from a variety of campus systems such as Blackboard, PeopleSoft, and myUMBC. Not surprisingly, the current 2025-26 Middle States Self Study and UMBC 3.0 Strategic Planning initiative will also focus on continuous improvement through curated, campus-wide data to inform decision making.
In addition to the migration to HelioCampus, which constitutes REX 2.0, the orientation video also describes:
New and (likely) soon-to-be-required training on the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) to access campus systems like PeopleSoft and REX itself.
How to find and use free training videos about Tableau’s “viewer” role, which will be used to access predefined (“canned”) reports largely migrated from REX 1.0 that used Microsoft Reporting Services (RS) reports.
A new “Analytics @ UMBC” Blackboard community where anyone can learn more about REX, “actionable intelligence,” and (eventually) even do some hands-on, self-paced data analysis with dummy data and AI.
How to get involved with UMBC’s analytics community of practice, including the REX developers’ and users’ groups.
If it's been a while since you've checked out REX, or wonder why and how you should start, please check out the orientation and refresher video or resources above.
]]>Chelsea Little of Fallston, MD was recently selected as one of the recipients of the 2025 Marilyn Demorest Love of Learning Award from The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi Chapter 022BC-University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Chelsea was selected by the awards committee for their outstanding academic excellence and active participation within the university and the broader community.In particular, the committee was impressed by Chelsea's perseverance to succeed and to live life by the PKP Motto - Philosophia Kateito Photo - Let the Love of Learning Rule Humanity. Chelsea is currently pursuing a PhD in Business Psychology.
Each spring, this chapter invites applications from its graduate student members. Two $500 awards will be distributed each year to the selected awardees. The Marilyn Demorest Love of Learning Award is bestowed in recognition of the many significant contributions made by Dr. Marilyn Demorest as a key founder and seminal leader of Chapter 22 UMBC of Phi Kappa Phi. Dr. Demorest's clear-eyed determination, detailed planning, and appreciation of both tradition and innovation infused the infant chapter with the carefully-built scaffolding needed for it to grow into the chapter we enjoy today. Marilyn's dedication to PKP and her own love of learning are the foundation for this award.
Chartered in 2010, Chapter 22BC invites the top 10 percent of seniors and 7.5 percent of juniors for membership in Phi Kappa Phi. Graduate students in the top 10 percent of the number of candidates for graduate degrees may also qualify, as do faculty, professional staff and alumni who have achieved scholarly distinction.
More About Phi Kappa Phi
Founded in 1897 at the University of Maine, Phi Kappa Phi is the nation's oldest and most selective collegiate honor society for all academic disciplines. The Society's mission is "To recognize and promote academic excellence in all fields of higher education and to engage the community of scholars in service to others." Since its founding, more than 1.5 million members have been initiated. Some of the organization's more notable members include former President Jimmy Carter, NASA astronaut Wendy Lawrence, novelist John Grisham and YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley. Each year, Phi Kappa Phi awards nearly $1 million to qualifying students and members through graduate fellowships, undergraduate study abroad grants, member and chapter awards, and grants for local and national literacy initiatives. For more information about Phi Kappa Phi, visit www.PhiKappaPhi.org.
]]>Jasmine A. Lee, MSW, PhD (she/her)
Associate Vice President, Community & Culture
Co-Director, Center for Social Justice Dialogue
jaslee@umbc.edu Connect with me via Webex Personal Room: https://umbc.webex.com/meet/jaslee | 640903142
912, Admin Building, 1000 Hilltop Circle
Baltimore, MD 21250
Watch out for fake emails with subjects like "Meeting/[your name]" asking to review your pension and UMBC benefits. These are NOT legitimate and are part of a phishing campaign DoIT is tracking.
Key things to remember: