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 correct referencing practice for your discipline area.
- For each assessment task, explain the extent to which collaboration is permitted and warning 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: using similarity checking software to identify plagiarism, comparing students’ performance across a number of tasks.
Create assessment tasks that minimise the opportunities for academic misconduct
You may have the opportunity to do this in your subject team or as part of course review.
In reviewing, adapting or modifying tasks make sure you consult with the course director first to ensure that all the task design elements will be incorporated in your revisions.
- Develop unique tasks: do not re-use assessment tasks in such a way that students who have acquired knowledge of the task 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, 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 methods of assessment, such as a submitted task with a related in-class component.
- Provide different students in the same cohort with different 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 (Clause 29-30)
Also see
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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.
Download TEQSA's Academic integrity in the creative arts PDF or click go to TEQSA Academic Integrity Publication for the full article
