The design of an assessment task can be a strong tool for supporting academic integrity. Careful thought about the task itself, the questions students are responding to and the artefact of their work can create an expectation that it has to be a student's original work. Find out more on this page.
Designing assessments with Academic Integrity
When designing assessments, academics must:
- Design assessment tasks to minimise the likelihood of academic misconduct.
- Ensure students know the correct referencing practice for your discipline area.
- For each assessment task, explain the extent to which collaboration is permitted and warn against collusion beyond this limit.
- Provide instructions on how group assessment work will be managed and marked to assess each group member’s contribution.
- Be vigilant for breaches of academic integrity. Use similarity-checking software to identify plagiarism, and compare students’ performance across a number of tasks.
Create assessment tasks that minimise the opportunities for academic misconduct
You may be able to do this in your subject team or as part of the course review.
When reviewing, adapting or modifying tasks, consult with the course director first to ensure that all the task design elements will be incorporated into your revisions.
- Develop unique tasks: Do not re-use assessment tasks so that students who have acquired knowledge of them from a previous offering of the subject are at an unfair advantage.
- Consider alternative assessment types such as a report, a multimedia presentation, a project, or a learning journal rather than an essay.
- Assess higher-order thinking skills that require students to apply knowledge rather than simply find and present answers.
- Combine different assessment methods, such as a submitted task with a related in-class component.
- Provide different students in the same cohort with various scenarios or data sets.
- Make the task more specific and less generalised so that the application of knowledge to a specific practical case is required (which can be varied from session to session).
- Incorporate an element of personal reflection, experience or opinion.
Please see the Charles Sturt Academic Integrity Procedure, Design and conduct of assessment.
Also see
Support
Please see the Charles Sturt Academic Integrity Procedure, Design and conduct of assessment (Clause 29-30)
TEQSA has provided some great resources supporting academic integrity:
- in creative arts
- as authentic learning
- how to embed it in the curriculum, and more.
Additional resources
See additional resources on TEQSA's Protecting academic integrity web page.
