Academic Integrity Policies

Any kind of educational operation should be affiliated with the principles of academic integrity and institutions aim to promote this and prevent academic misconduct by the help of their institutional policies. This enables them to increase the quality of education through creating an atmosphere of trust at the institutional level and to bring honest individuals to society. Although such principles depend on the values of individuals, building them requires extensive collaboration of a wide range of stakeholders. One crucial cornerstone of building integrity at an institution is to develop an academic integrity policy that reflects institutional understanding regarding efforts to establish integrity including reactional approaches to academic misconduct. Therefore, a well-developed policy should be inclusive enough to cover responsibilities of stakeholders, integrity education, investigation protocols of suspected cases, violations, sanctions, restorative justice in addition to pedagogy, assessment design and training and other aspects.

Developing a policy will serve as a roadmap for an institution in building integrity as an initial step of developing institutional culture. Although it is vital to have a well-developed policy as the first step, it should be remembered that policies should be specific to institutions, respond to the contextual dynamics of institutions, and be compatible with the mission and vision of institutions. Considering ongoing changes in academia, institutional policies should be kept up-to-date by means of revisions. Yet, both developing and revising policies are quite difficult due to social, psychological, and legal dimensions of the documents involved. Therefore, expert assistance either in development or revision of policies can be very useful.