This list of best practice strategies is based on "Institutional Policies/Practices and Course Design Strategies to Promote Academic Integrity in Online Education," produced by WCET (WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies) in February 2009 and updated in April 2009. In May 2009, the Instructional Technology Council (ITC) surveyed…

Regrettably, cheating is widespread on all levels of our educational system. Effective monitoring and judicial review processes that ensure that students who cheat are subjected to appropriate disciplinary action are essential. However, policing is not enough. We must go beyond policing to change the culture of the classroom in ways that…

Identifying academic misdemeanours and actual applied effort in student assessments involving practical work can be problematic. For instance, it can be difficult to assess the actual effort that a student applied, the sequence and method applied, and whether there was any form of collusion or collaboration. In this paper we propose a system of…

Despite much research, skepticism remains over the possibility of profiling scholastic cheaters. However, several relevant predictor variables and newer diagnostic tools have been overlooked. We remedy this deficit with a series of three studies. Study 1 was a large-scale survey of a broad range of personality predictors of self-reported cheating.…

Academic dishonesty is not new, but recent research reviews and the media indicate that its prevalence is on the rise and that it erodes public confidence in academia. Such loss can be ill afforded at at time when the costs of education are increasing, and both federal and public funding are decreasing. The author discusses: (1) What is academic…

Corruption is a problem that continues to plague developed and developing countries worldwide. Previous studies have explored the negative implications of corruption on several aspects of human development, but, despite its serious and long-lasting consequences, the impact of corruption on educational outcomes has started to receive attention only…

A statistical analysis of multiple-choice answers is performed to identify anomalies that can be used as evidence of student cheating. The ratio of exact errors in common (EEIC: two students put the same wrong answer for a question) to differences (D: two students get different answers) was found to be a good indicator of cheating under a wide…

The authors discuss a new method that combines the randomized response technique with item response theory. This method allows the researcher to obtain information at the individual person level without knowing the true responses. With this new method, it is possible to compare groups of individuals by means of analysis of variance or regression…

Criteria had been proposed for assessing the severity of possible test security violations for computerized tests with high-stakes outcomes. However, these criteria resulted from theoretical derivations that assumed uniformly randomized item selection. This study investigated potential damage caused by organized item theft in computerized adaptive…

Integral to higher education, academic integrity stands as a cornerstone of academic life. However, compelling evidence of widespread academic dishonesty among Net-Generation students threatens to undermine both the environment of trust that nourishes integrity and the safeguards that help ensure it. Working from their experience with widespread…

A recent cheating scandal at a top business school led at least one commentator to propose recasting cheating as postmodern learning. Paradoxically counterproductive, the proposal represents a special challenge to the academy. As accountable institutions, universities serve students by purposefully integrating integrity initiatives into the most…

Plagiarism has become the new piracy. Just as piracy was a few years ago, plagiarism has become the hot, new crime du jour--an act that suggests immorality and often scandal at once. What's more, plagiarism allegations feed into the society's "Candid Camera" mentality--the seemingly insatiable need to uncover wrongdoing. One of the biggest…

Are prospective employers getting "quality" educated degreed applicants and are academic institutions that offer online degree programs ensuring the quality control of the courses/programs offered? The issue specifically addressed in this paper is not with all institutions offering degrees through online programs or even with all online…

Reviews a book that provides useful information for those who must deal with the problem of cheating on tests. The book explains ethical and practical issues associated with cheating, the frequency with which it occurs, details of cheating methods, and detection of cheating. (SLD)