You are here:

Design assessment for academic integrity

At a glance

Identify practical strategies for designing assessment tasks that support academic integrity, including building high-integrity task design, incorporating authenticity, scaffolding student understanding, providing meaningful feedback, planning marking and grading, targeting assessment security, and reflecting on and reviewing your approach after each teaching period.

Research shows that there will always be a percentage of students that engage in dishonest behaviour (Bretag et al., 2018), and that no assessment type is completely impervious to misconduct (Dawson, 2020). In addition to communicating clearly about academic integrity, there are measures that can be taken when writing assessment tasks to limit or mitigate opportunities for breaches of academic integrity.

Assessment shows what we value and directs student learning. Assessing low level cognitive skills and memorisation lends itself more to students breaching academic integrity than complex, challenging and higher-order thinking assessments that require application. Opportunities for students to demonstrate creativity, problem-solving and reflection and even negotiate their own assessment can allow for authenticity but also mitigate against generic responses to assessment prompts.
Think about the assessment regime in your unit as a program of assessment. The program comprises a range of tasks that allow students to demonstrate their ability to perform the skills and knowledge that align with the learning outcomes.
To learn more about the principles and benefits of program assessment, and how it ensures assessment integrity visit Programmatic Approaches to Assessment.
You can adopt this approach in a unit where the regime is the way you gather evidence of student learning in your unit. You can also think about a program of assessment across multiple units, or in a course. When you do this, it means that you can see the opportunities across a program of assessment that can be taken to include formative assessment tasks and also to identify which, if any, tasks may need to have higher assessment security measures applied to them.
Knowing whether tasks are diagnostic, formative or summative makes it possible to choose the appropriate security measures and/or feedback processes. Selecting tasks carefully can allow us to anticipate where misconduct and breach might happen and adjust workload or investigation approaches accordingly (e.g., certain sections of a report or essay).
Another way to design for high integrity is to plan for renewing, changing and updating assessment. This aligns with Monash policy and procedures and is required at the end of each teaching period.
Assessment tasks that integrate authentic conditions can enhance academic integrity. Integrating authentic conditions means to define the physical and social parameters of a task so that the performance requirement from a student aligns closely with how a skill may be practised or knowledge applied in authentic workplace or discipline contexts.
This is in contrast to assessment tasks that adopt artificial conditions (e.g., not using a calculator when this would be used in authentic contexts or including or excluding materials that would be available in an authentic context).
Assessments that allow students to learn through the assessment process can provide them with greater ownership (e.g., ePortfolios, reflective pieces, practical assessment). When students see the assessment as valuable and purposeful and have the appropriate scaffolding to succeed, they can see the benefit in completing the work themselves.
Additional strategies to instil integrity practices include:
- Nesting tasks together, with feedback that feeds forward into the next task
- Incorporating drafting processes for students
- Valuing the process as well as the product
- Including genuine reflective components and different modes (video, audio, visual)
- Using randomised question banks or assessment briefs
- Using varied data sets, scenarios and details
- Linking tasks to specific contexts (including activities or cases from in class) and avoiding broad or unspecific questions
- Designing tasks with open-ended solutions to encourage individualised responses
Assessment tasks that allow students to demonstrate their understanding of academic integrity and receive feedback on their approach without fear of reprisal provide opportunities for students to develop appropriate skills and understanding without the pressure or stress associated with triggering dishonest behaviours.
This is a useful strategy for students who are at the entry points to degrees or courses.
Introducing assessment tasks to students is a valuable opportunity to induct them into the values of academic integrity and assessment practices and show students how to be successful while upholding academic integrity in their own work.
Allow students to develop their own personal concept of integrity by making sure they are aware of what constitutes good and bad practice in your discipline and in the assessment tasks.
Give examples and share your expectations specifically for areas of past or anticipated concern (such as citations, referencing and paraphrasing). Even if there isn’t any group assessment in the unit, it is important to explain what collaboration looks like and unpack the areas where it might lead to confusion (e.g., sharing notes, working in groups, asking for someone to review a task).
Academic staff might use academic integrity breaches as opportunities to open a dialogue about the correct way to approach matters (Bertram Gallant 2017), where the focus is on student learning rather than on breach detection (Sefcik et al., 2020).
Help students to understand why they are being assessed and what they should be learning through the assessment. Explain the importance of the reflective process and indicate the type of growth that students should expect throughout the unit. Using assessment to develop an understanding of quality and standards through clear discussions of rubrics, performance criteria and exercises in self, peer and exemplar marking can allow for the development of evaluative judgement (Boud et al., 2018; To et al., 2021), meaning students may be less likely to look for help elsewhere.
If students are required to produce particular conventions, formats or reproduce ways of disciplinary thinking in their assessment, provide them with links to reputable and useful resources or tools for referencing and citations so that they do not need to search for the information themselves and potentially commit accidental plagiarism. It can also be helpful to articulate if conventions vary from discipline to discipline.
Supports students in developing their understanding of academic integrity by including formative opportunities for feedback targeted specifically at academic integrity practice throughout the assessment process.
When feedback is perceived as a ‘dialogue’, or ongoing conversation between the student, educators and peers in order to improve the student’s work (Dawson 2020), it allows for the building of relationships between students and educators and acts as a protective factor in cheating. It may also discourage students from cheating and make it more difficult for the work to be outsourced.
Using technology mediated feedback such as video or audio, can amplify these feelings of satisfaction, personalisation and connectedness. A key part of the feedback process is providing students with support and assistance on the areas that need improvement.
To explore how other Monash educators approach giving feedback in their teaching practice, visit ‘Give Feedback’ on Be Inspired or browse feedback-related blog posts on the Monash Teaching Community.
Having clearly defined marking criteria and shared understandings of levels of performance amongst students and educators is an important part of upholding academic integrity.
When planning for marking and grading, consider:
- Designing rubrics to value academic integrity practices appropriately and allocating weighting to ‘meta-knowledge’ or critical understanding can prompt deeper levels of engagement.
- Engaging with students to co-design rubrics or assessment tasks can also develop capacity and ownership.
- Having conversations with the marking team about what cheating or contract cheating might look like and even including some deliberate examples in calibration exercises may improve detection rates (Dawson, 2020).
Assessment security describes the “measures taken to harden assessment against attempts to cheat. This includes approaches to detect and evidence attempts to cheat, as well as measures to make cheating more difficult” (Dawson, 2020, p19).
Incorporating a verbal ‘defence’ or summative element in the assessment design can be a positive way of promoting academic integrity. Engaging in security checks, or establishing a system whereby a random selection of students are asked to explain their assessment in-depth or justify their work can establish a culture of accountability and promote honesty.
The following practices may be less secure (Dawson, 2020):
- Reusing the same assessment task
- Unsupervised online tests used for summative assessment (mitigated somewhat by large question banks, short time limits, original questions and controlled release of answers)
- Take home lower-level or single answer tasks
- Unmonitored group work
As securing all assessment against cheating is impractical, a sound assessment security strategy focuses on securing the most important or high stakes pieces of assessment while developing academic integrity practices with other assessments and formative tasks. When considering security measures such as invigilation, it is important to consider the purpose and objective of the task (Dawson, 2021).
An important part of every teaching and assessment regime is taking the opportunity to reflect and take note of what has and has not worked throughout the teaching period. Identify areas that were problematic from an integrity perspective and reinforce these in future guidance.
Where practicable, ask students to provide feedback during and at the end of the teaching period through focus groups, discussions and surveys (Feed Forward and SETU) to inform improvements.
Bertram Gallant, T. (2017) Academic Integrity as a Teaching & Learning Issue: From Theory to Practice, Theory Into Practice, 56:2, 88-94, DOI: 10.1080/00405841.2017.1308173
Boud, D., Ajjawi, R., Dawson, P., Tai, J. (2018). Developing evaluative judgement in higher education : assessment for knowing and producing quality work. Routledge.
Bretag, T., Curtis, G., McNeill, M. & Slade, C. (2018) Academic Integrity in Australian higher education: A national priority
Bretag, T., Harper, R., Burton, M., Ellis, C., Newton, P., Rozenberg, P., Saddiqui, S., & van Haeringen, K. (2019a). Contract cheating: a survey of Australian university students. Studies in Higher Education (Dorchester-on-Thames), 44(11), 1837–1856. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2018.1462788
Carless, D. (2015). Excellence in University Assessment: Learning from award-winning practice. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315740621
Dawson, P., & ProQuest. (2020). Defending Assessment Security in a Digital World Preventing e-Cheating and Supporting Academic Integrity in Higher Education : Preventing e-Cheating and Supporting Academic Integrity in Higher Education. Routledge.
Dawson, Philip (2021). The remote proctored exams dilemma. https://www.slideshare.net/PhillipDawson3/the-remote-proctored-exams-dilemma
Schuwirth, Lambert & Van der Vleuten, Cees. (2011). Programmatic assessment: From assessment of learning to assessment for learning. Medical teacher. 33. 478-85. 10.3109/0142159X.2011.565828
Sefcik, L., Striepe, M., & Yorke, J. (2020). Mapping the landscape of academic integrity education programs: what approaches are effective? Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 45(1), 30–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2019.1604942
To, J., Panadero, E., & Carless, D. (2021) A systematic review of the educational uses and effects of exemplars, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, DOI: 10.1080/02602938.2021.2011134

Your feedback matters

Let us know how we can improve this resource.

Back: Detect a breach Next: Embed academic integrity

Learning and Teaching: Teach HQ

Learning and Teaching: Teach HQ

Design assessment for academic integrity

At a glance

Your feedback matters