While the integrity of academic work has always been vitally important, since the establishment of the International Center for Academic Integrity in 1992 increasing attention has been paid to the area. The term academic integrity now explicitly appears in policy and in job titles or offices tasked with either detection, training, or both.…

As higher education is shifting to virtual teaching, examinations are increasingly conducted virtually, often proctored. Unfortunately, virtual proctored examinations--proctored remotely using technologies--can be prone to cheating. Some anti-cheating measures can be built into the virtual proctoring technologies, but cheating can still occur.…

Student self-assessment research underscores the significance of honestly recognizing strengths and weaknesses, facilitating self-regulated learning and progress. The Integrated Quality Assessment (IQA) in China combines self-assessment with other data to evaluate achievement, serving dual purposes: promoting students' awareness of their strengths…

Increasing pressure is being placed on governments and legislators in different countries to take action against assignment outsourcing in higher education. Global discussions focus on prohibiting commercial outsourcing providers, such as contract cheating services. Despite evidence to suggest that outsourcing behaviours by students are…

Current approaches used by educational institutions to address the problem of student cheating are not working. This is because the discourse of academic integrity that currently dominates is, on its own, inadequate for addressing the problem. We propose that in order for higher education institutions to challenge cheating effectively, they need…

That the manifestation of cheating varies between disciplines is rarely discussed, an unspoken assumption being that assessment takes the form of written prose supported by a bibliography. Students and academics from disciplines, such as mathematics, not fitting this model can feel that their work is regarded as an aberration. 'Plagiarism' is not…

This study explores the social nature of learning and discusses its implications for student assessment. To this end, we analyzed a sample of unique first-hand accounts of students seeking help with academic work, relying on the grounded theory approach for the identification of incentives for academic support (n = 807), and used time-series…

Assessment accommodations are used globally in higher education systems to ensure that students with disabilities can participate fairly in assessment. Even though assessment accommodations are supposed to promote access, not success, they are commonly portrayed as potentially being "cheating" in that they provide certain students with…

The extent and reach of commercial cheating opportunities is ever present; thousands of websites promote differing business models offering assignments in multiple languages and currencies. In addition to commercial companies, students are known to outsource their assignments from friends and family. Assignment outsourcing and contract cheating…

Contract cheating is an increasingly challenging problem facing the higher education sector. This study assesses the current state of contract cheating research from various methodological and empirical perspectives. Through a systematic literature review of 51 peer-reviewed articles on contract cheating in higher education, we identify clusters…

Cheating attracts a significant amount of attention in conversations about assessment, and with good reason: if students cheat, we cannot be sure they have met the learning outcomes of their course. In this conceptual article we question the attention given to cheating as a concept and argue that the broader concept of validity is a more important…

Educators set restrictions in examinations to enable them to assess learning outcomes under particular conditions. The open book versus closed book binary is an example of the sorts of restrictions examiners have traditionally set. In the late 2000s this was expanded to a trinary to include open web examinations. However, the current technology…

Academic dishonesty threatens the integrity of performance assessment, making it crucial to understand the various types and predictors of such behavior. Second-party cheating, which refers to aiding and abetting cheating behaviors, is similarly prevalent as individualistic cheating, yet has received limited research attention. We follow up on…

This study offers a critical examination of university policies developed to address recent challenges presented by generative AI (GenAI) to higher education assessment. Drawing on Bacchi's 'What's the problem represented to be' (WPR) framework, we analysed the GenAI policies of 20 world-leading universities to explore what are considered problems…

Contract cheating happens when students commission someone else to do assessed work for them. While it is already illegal in 18 jurisdictions, others are considering making the provision of contract cheating services illegal. To date, legal approaches to addressing contract cheating have faced little scrutiny in the peer reviewed literature. This…