Embedding a culture of academic integrity: A two-pronged approach

Abstract

While universities have instituted use of various forms of technologies to help identify instances of academic integrity compromises, these tools are unable to detect cases where students get someone else to do their academic work for them. This paper discusses a two-stage approach to addressing academic integrity at a postgraduate business studies course where students were engaged in understanding what academic integrity means within their context and explore various forms of unethical behaviours. They were also made aware about various institutional policies and procedures for academic integrity breaches. This was followed with a post-assessment, ad-hoc feedback from students about their submitted work. Although a thorough evaluation is planned at a later stage, this paper shares some initial results about the effectiveness of this approach to countering academic misconduct behaviours. The paper will be of interest to other teaching academics interested in developing a culture of academic integrity.