Reducing academic integrity: Students leading the way

Background/context, including relevant literature An agenda to reduce academic integrity breaches in higher education has only become evident since the early 2000s (Bretag et al., 2011), but only 1 in every 100 students who cheat are caught, and recent research suggests commercial cheating is on the rise (Curtis et al., 2022). The reason academic integrity issues continue to grow is because universities are not allowing students to lead the charge. Description of the research, initiative or practice The School of Business and Law’s (SBL) Academic Integrity Plan’s theoretical foundation is based on the Students as Partners (SaP) initiative. It believes students should interact with faculty/academic staff to solve problems occurring at universities. By combining academic misconduct prevention with the SaP framework, an effective framework can be developed that involves using the intellect of our students to understand why cheating occurs and inspire innovative approaches related to reducing academic integrity breaches. Method(s) of evaluative data collection and analysis SBL implemented an Academic Integrity Improvement Plan that involved several solutions and strategies. This approach involved implementing an action plan for the school, which equated to 7,000 student enrolment across 100 units of study each term. To assess the success of this approach, we used archival data and current data from the StudentOne Case Summary Dashboard and the Educational Quality and Integrity academic misconduct annual reports to measure the number of academic misconduct cases before and after the implementation of our Academic Integrity Improvement Plan. Evidence of outcomes and effectiveness The Academic Integrity Improvement Plan was successful because there was a 69.22% reduction in overall university breaches from the School of Business and Law after the program was implemented. In other words, the SBL had 72.22% of overall university breachers before the program was implemented and 3% of the overall university breachers after the program was implemented. The considerable decrease in breaches can be ascribed to the educational and preventative actions the school has undertaken over the past years to mitigate risks of academic integrity.