• Section 1 - Summary
• Section 2 - Scope
• Section 3 - Definitions
• Section 4 - Policy Statement
• Section 5 - Procedures
• Section 6 - Guidelines
• Part A - Addressing Poor Scholarship
• Part B - Defining Academic Integrity Breaches
• Part C - Plagiarism
• How is Plagiarism Detected?
• Assessment Design to Prevent Plagiarism
• Using Urkund Originality Check to Detect Plagiarism
• Part D - Washing
• Part E - Academic File-sharing
• Ways to prevent academic file-sharing
• Part F - Contract Cheating
• How to Detect Contract Cheating
• Assessment Design To Prevent Contract Cheating
• Part G - Examination and Test Cheating
• Part H - Collusion
• How to detect collusion
• Part I - Responses
• Poor scholarship (citation)
• Educative responses to minor plagiarism, collusion and file sharing
• Penalties
• Educative Responses to Minor Plagiarism
• Sanction responses
• How to record an educative response
• How to pass on more serious matters to the student misconduct process
• How to record breaches involving research
• Section 7 - Decision-Making Matrix

Section 1 - Summary

(1) This Guideline aims to assist academic and teaching staff in preventing, detecting and responding to breaches of academic integrity by students.

Section 2 - Scope

(2) This Guideline applies to:

1. All teaching staff who are involved in assessing the work of coursework students at VU in whatever mode (face to face, blended or online);
2. All supervisory staff who are involved in supervising the research of research candidates at VU.

Section 3 - Definitions

(3) Academic Integrity

(4) Collusion

(5) Contract Cheating: This occurs when a student requests or pays someone else to produce all or part of an assessment task that is submitted as their own work, including arrangements through a third party. It may include the use of contract cheating service providers or websites.

(6) File Sharing

(7) Plagiarism

(8) Poor Scholarship (citation): The inadequate, incomplete or misleading citation of references and sources, including the student's own past work if relied upon.

(9) Research

(10) Washing

Section 4 - Policy Statement

(11) See Academic Integrity Policy.

Section 5 - Procedures

(12) See Student Misconduct Procedure.

Section 6 - Guidelines

(13) Academic integrity is important for any university in assuring quality and maintaining a high standard of student work and academic research. Supporting academic integrity means:

1. Supporting students to understand and apply correct citation for written work;
2. Requiring the full scholarly acknowledgement of the sources consulted in the creation of a piece of research;
3. Reinforcing to students that any form of contract cheating, falsification of information or bribery is serious academic misconduct and will be treated as such;
4. Ensuring the integrity of examinations, in whatever format or mode they are conducted; and
5. Working to minimise the opportunity and incentive for students to engage in any form of dishonesty with their assessments.

(14) The integrity of the learning process must be maintained by the University - it is vital that plagiarism, contract cheating and other forms of cheating are minimised and dealt with seriously when they arise.

Part A - Addressing Poor Scholarship

(15) At times, assessed work can show evidence of incomplete, improper or inaccurate citation. This may occur:

1. When a student makes a genuine attempt to reference their work, but has inadequate referencing skills; or
2. Where a student displays a lack of awareness that the content used should be cited (e.g. using verbatim content from course note materials, or their own notes of a lecturer's material that use phrases without acknowledgement); or
3. When a student reuses their own original work that has previously been presented for assessment, at VU or elsewhere, without acknowledgment.

(16) In these cases, the issues should not be treated as an academic integrity breach. Teaching staff should address the poor scholarship within the feedback on the assessed work and, as needed, direct the student to undertake academic support modules to help improve their understanding of correct citation skills.

Part B - Defining Academic Integrity Breaches

(17) Academic integrity breaches may include:

1. Plagiarism and failures of correct acknowledgement or citation practice;
2. Submitting work written by another person;
3. Paying for another person to write an assignment or purchasing pre-prepared pieces via academic cheating services;
4. Collusion, such as uncredited collaboration or copying other peoples’ work;
5. Cheating or copying in exams, whether in-person closed-book examinations or online/open book exams;
6. Offering or accepting bribes of any kind;
7. Providing false information about yourself or your background.

(18) Some forms of academic integrity breaches may be more straightforward to detect, and address, than others.

Part C - Plagiarism

(19) Plagiarism involves the insufficient (or even non-existent) acknowledgment of the materials used in creating a student's assessment piece. This may be accidental (e.g. poor referencing skills) or intentional (e.g. copying uncredited material from the internet and passing it off as one's own work). 

(20) Plagiarism may constitute a deliberate attempt to deceive an assessor by claiming work as one's own, or it may be an unintentional breach of academic integrity in circumstances where knowledge of citation/attribution could have been reasonably expected but where the person was not aware of, or did not fully understand, the need to cite sources. It may also involve reusing of one's own work without citing the previous use.

How is Plagiarism Detected?

(21) Plagiarism can be detected in a variety of ways relevant to the nature of the work being undertaken. These include:

1. The use of pattern recognition software like Urkund Originality Check for written assessment or research materials;
2. Expert identification of copied themes or ideas in visual arts, practical artifacts, performance pieces and other relevant activities;
3. Creator or other expert identification of copied research data, formulae, software code or other non-textual material;
4. Examiner or peer reviewer noting of copied material from theses, published work or research findings.

(22) To prevent plagiarism, academics may wish to:

1. Discuss the values of academic integrity, student responsibilities and possible consequences for breaches throughout the unit;
2. Teach citational skills in class;
3. Use Urkund Originality Check for assessments and examine the originality reports. Results will vary depending on the assignment and level of research required, but generally a result of over 30% is cause for concern, unless the piece is designed as a literature review, laboratory report (where there is an expectation of a fair degree of similarity in the correct presentation and write up of statistical findings) or requires students to repeat verbatim set learned text (where there is only one correct answer).
4. Require students to sign a pledge of originality on assessment cover sheets.

Assessment Design to Prevent Plagiarism

(23) Plagiarism can be minimised by careful assessment design. This may include:

1. Setting assessments designed to detect student skill levels such as tests and tutorial oral presentations assigned at the start of semester
2. Using assessment rubrics that measure citational skills
3. Conducting in-class writing exercises for a baseline writing sample

(24) In an online environment, plagiarism in test or exam settings can be reduced by:

1. Utilising tests with limited time releases (ie available only for the period of the test);
2. Using Urkund Originality Check or other tools to compare submitted online exam papers with known existing work
3. Setting exam questions that call for originality in the approach to the answer and cannot be effectively responded to with a "cut and paste" approach;
4. For examinations that are required to be time-bound and fact-based for professional accreditation purposes, online invigilation methods may be available to satisfy the requirement.

Using Urkund Originality Check to Detect Plagiarism

(25) The University currently uses the pattern recognition software program Urkund Originality Check to check written work for potential plagiarism. This is an important tool for use by staff and students that has many benefits for the University. These tools compare submitted text to a comprehensive database of work from across the world on a word by word basis.

(26) Originality Reports are not plagiarism reports, nor are percentage matches always necessarily indicative of levels of plagiarism - they are simply a tool to assist in bringing work with matching text to assessors' attention. Appropriate and accurate citation may well produce a higher score. As a result, the report requires interpretation and interrogation, and a case by case examination of whether plagiarism has occurred or not must still be performed.

(27) Care should be taken to properly interpret Urkund Originality Check results, especially in circumstances where students' work is scoring higher merely because it is substantially similar to other students' work which happened to have been marked earlier. In this case, it should not be assumed that the later-marked assessment is necessarily the perpetrator of greater plagiarism.

(28) Staff can use pattern recognition software to generate Originality Reports to assist in the identification of written work that may warrant further investigation for potential plagiarism. They can also use the tool as a teaching tool to assist in conveying good academic integrity practices to their students.

(29) Students can use pattern recognition software to generate their own Originality Reports and to self-educate about appropriate acknowledgment.

Part D - Washing

(30) “Washing" is a new form of plagiarism in which a student uses Google Translate to translate their assessment into another language and then back again into English. This process involves automatically substituted generated synonyms and phrases and creating an ostensibly "new" document. 

(31) Urkund Originality Check does not detect this process. However, if a substantial portion of the assessment is in clearly unidiomatic English, including odd synonyms or phrases or even gibberish, then the student has probably been washing and thus must be penalised for plagiarism.

(32) If washing is admitted or proven, this form of academic integrity breach is automatically treated as academic misconduct, as it demonstrates an intention to deceive.

Part E - Academic File-sharing

(33) Academic file-sharing occurs when students or graduates make any aspect of their study and assessment materials available to others. It differs from Contract Cheating (see Part E below) as it rarely involves the exchange of money, although a barter/swap model may be in place.

(34) In some instances, academic file-sharing may not be a breach of academic integrity (e.g. a student sharing lecture notes with a classmate who was absent from the class). However, sharing assessed material without the prior knowledge and consent of the unit convenor following advice from the Course Chair is a breach of academic integrity, as it allows for both plagiarism and collusion.

(35) Students sometimes choose to share their study materials and assessments (with each other or online) altruistically, and as a contribution to community-building, without being aware that this may create both intellectual property and academic integrity breach issues.

(36) Students may use crowdsourced services such as StuDocu, CourseHero, ThinkSwap, Student VIP, and Chegg.com to share files. These services provide brief disclaimers on the importance of academic integrity, but nonetheless encourage students to share material without a full understanding of the implications of sharing their assessments in an environment that enables and potentially encourages others to breach academic integrity by reusing their work.

Ways to prevent academic file-sharing

(37) To help prevent unauthorised academic file-sharing, academic staff should:

1. Explicitly and directly communicate to students in each unit what the expectations are regarding the sharing of academic files, and that these expectations continue after the unit is completed;
2. Ensure that an adequate and useful number of assessment examples are provided for student reference and engagement in an approved and productive manner; and
3. Conduct searches on file-sharing sites for assessed material relating to their units of study if they suspect students may have been accessing past assessments.

Part F - Contract Cheating

(38) Contract cheating involves the procurement of an assignment or piece of research from another party, sometimes but not always an academic cheating service. This may be facilitated by a fellow student, friend or purchased on a website. Other forms of contract cheating include paying another person to sit an exam in the student's place.

(39) Contract cheating does not always involve payment. Any procurement of a document with the intention of presenting it as the student's own work, whether money is involved or not, may be contract cheating.

How to Detect Contract Cheating

(40) Contract cheating can be detected by pattern recognition software as well as expert analysis by the academic of the student's work as a whole, taking into account student contribution to class.

(41) Purchased assessments are also often characterised by being vague, not responsive to or only tangentially responsive to the topic, and using words, phrases, structures or norms inconsistent with the Australian vernacular.

(42) The presentation of several or many substantially similar assessment pieces within one unit may also indicate that assessments have been purchased.

(43) To help prevent contract cheating, academic staff can:

1. Discuss the values of academic integrity, student responsibilities and possible consequences for breaches throughout unit;
2. Embed unique descriptors and instructor data into assessment specifications, then create Google alerts to track the terms on known academic cheating sites;
3. Regularly upload assessment specifications into Urkund Originality Check to provide match sources for contract cheating requests;
4. Incorporate discipline relevant case studies that explore the problematic nature of contract cheating;
5. Use well invigilated examinations. For online examinations that are required to be time-bound and fact-based for professional accreditation purposes, online invigilation methods may be available to satisfy the requirement.

Assessment Design To Prevent Contract Cheating

(44) Contract cheating may be reduced through careful course design. Academics may wish to:

1. Use unique assessments that incorporate information from class discussions or lecture material;
2. Change assessment topics for each student cohort;
3. Use carefully designed group assessments so students cannot split up assessments into individual components;
4. Link tests with coursework assessments (i.e. reflecting on an assessment under test conditions);
5. Assess the learning process, requiring students to show critical evidence of their learning process. Assessment proposals, drafts, annotated bibliographies, and other critical reflections would be appropriate.

(45) Where contract cheating is suspected or admitted by students, the matter must be referred for a student misconduct investigation. VU, via the Integrity Office, will also inform TEQSA of any information provided by the student regarding the academic cheating service. The provision of such services is now a crime and will be pursued by TEQSA in its regulatory capacity.

Part G - Examination and Test Cheating

(46) Examination and test cheating can involve:

1. Copying the work of another examination candidate in an in-person exam;
2. Using unauthorised answers, reference material, notes, or devices containing these;
3. Requesting or permitting another person to take your place (impersonate you) at a test or examination; or
4. Any other breach of the Examination Rules as per the Assessment for Learning - Examination Assessment Procedure.

(47) In-person examination and test integrity is primarily ensured by the presence of invigiliators or the academic staff member setting the test, who have responsibility for administering, monitoring and collecting papers.

(48) In an online environment, consideration should be given to examination and test design that calls for more discursive answers and less purely factual recall testing. Exams that primarily test knowledge recall or have a single correct answer, such as multiple choice questions, make cheating easier and more likely where face to face invigilation is not possible. Academics may wish to:

1. Where appropriate, reduce or minimise the use of final examinations as a primary method of assessment;
2. Where examinations are retained, consider moving to an open-book model where the examination tests skills and the application of knowledge rather than the retention of facts;
3. Where a closed-book, time-limited examination is required to satisfy course or professional accreditation requirements, use time-restricted locked examination sites which may be combined with randomised videoconference-based observation of candidates or other tools; and/or
4. Support written examinations with short viva examinations via videoconference of selected candidates.

Part H - Collusion

(49) Collusion involves the copying or uncredited collaboration of material between students of unit materials (that is, the work of multiple people credited only by a single author).

(50) Collaboration that is required or approved as part of the course and assessment design is not collusion. Students engaging in group discussions, completing group assignments together, or convening study groups, are not colluding, and are not liable to penalties under the Academic Integrity Policy.

How to detect collusion

(51) Collusion can be detected in a number of ways relevant to the nature of the work being undertaken, including:

1. The use of pattern recognition software such as Urkund Originality Check for written assessment or research materials;
2. The expert identification by assessor of substantially overlapping or identical assessment responses from two or more students in a unit;
3. Examiner or peer reviewer noting of substantially overlapping or identical material in theses, works submitted for publication, or research findings.

Part I - Responses

(52) The potential penalties for plagiarism, collusion and file sharing may be either in the form of an educative response or a sanction response.

(53) Contract cheating and examination cheating are treated as serious misconduct and a sanction response is appropriate.

Poor scholarship (citation)

(54) A student whose work shows an attempt, even if incomplete or inadequate, to cite their sources has not committed plagiarism. Similarly, the use of quotations where punctuation indicates that the text is a quotation but the origin of the quotation is not acknowledged is poor scholarship, not plagiarism.

(55) This is because a student who has attempted to indicate that words are not their own is not intending to deceive the assessor, or claim the words of others as original product.

(56) Poor scholarship should be addressed holistically in the context of the teaching, learning and assessment environment, with citation treated as one element of good scholarship practice among many.

Educative responses to minor plagiarism, collusion and file sharing

(57) Educative responses rather than sanction responses may be applied to minor acts of plagiarism (e.g. the use of paragraphs or sentences from a source rather than whole arguments or more extended passages), where collusion has occurred in an inadvertent fashion (e.g. students working closely together submitting similar assignments) or where "innocent" (unknowing) file sharing activity has taken place.

(58) An academic staff member's choice to address these matters in an educative manner does not result in a finding of Academic Misconduct and should not be recorded as an instance of misconduct or plagiarism on the student's record. However, it will still be recorded on the University's Register of Academic Integrity Breaches.

(59) An educative response is by its nature non-punitive. An educative response to plagiarism must not include a deduction of marks beyond the usual marks assigned for referencing skills. Assigning a grade of zero for an assessment item or a unit for a breach of academic integrity is a sanction rather than educative response, and can only be issued via the processes specified in the Student Misconduct Regulations 2019 and Student Misconduct Procedure.

(60) Educative responses may include:

1. Providing verbal or written feedback to the student;
2. Providing the opportunity to redo and resubmit the assessment (if this opportunity is given, the maximum mark that may be achieved on resubmission is 50% Pass);
3. Deducting marks allocated for referencing, with explanation of the reasons;
4. Referring the student to one of the academic assistance programs available within the University;
5. Providing the student with examples of plagiarised and non-plagiarised texts to assist them in understanding the difference.

(61) In determining if an educative response is appropriate, staff members should consider:

1. Other work submitted within the unit by the student;
2. The student's stage within their course (i.e. first-year students may have less understanding of academic integrity and citation requirements than later-year students);
3. The nature and level of the breach (i.e. reproducing an entire chapter of a text would be more serious than reproducing a paragraph);
4. Whether the student has been involved in an academic integrity breach previously (staff should consult the Register of Academic Integrity Breaches to ascertain this).

Penalties

(62) The potential penalties for plagiarism or collusion may be either in the form of an educative response or a punitive response.

(63) Contract cheating is generally treated as serious misconduct and a punitive response is appropriate.

Educative Responses to Minor Plagiarism

(64) Educative responses rather than punitive responses may be applied to minor acts of plagiarism where some effort has been made to cite sources, or where collusion has occurred in an inadvertent fashion (eg students working closely together submitting similar assignments).

(65) An academic staff member's choice to address inadequate acknowledgement in an educative manner does not result in a finding of Academic Misconduct and should not be recorded as an instance of misconduct or plagiarism on the student's file. However, it will still be recorded on the University's Register of Academic Integrity Breaches.

(66) Educative response is by its nature non-punitive. An educative response does not include a deduction of marks beyond the usual marks assigned for referencing skills. Assigning a grade of zero for a breach of academic integrity is a punitive rather than educative response.

(67) Educative responses may include:

1. Providing verbal or written feedback to the student.
2. Providing the opportunity to redo and resubmit the assessment.
3. Deducting marks allocated for referencing, with explanation of the reasons.
4. Referring the student to one of the academic assistance programs available within the University.
5. Providing the student with examples of plagiarised and non-plagiarised texts to assist them in understanding the difference.

(68) In determining if an educative response is appropriate, staff members should consider:

1. Other work submitted within the unit by the student.
2. The student's stage within their course (i.e. first-year students may have less understanding of academic integrity and citation requirements than later-year students).
3. The nature and level of the breach (i.e. reproducing an entire chapter of a text would be more serious than reproducing a paragraph).
4. Whether the student has been involved in an academic integrity breach previously (staff should consult the Register of Academic Integrity Breaches to ascertain this).

Sanction responses

(69) A sanction is appropriate for serious breaches of academic integrity such as intentional plagiarism, contract cheating, repeated and intentional file sharing, washing, bribery, falsification of information, and exam cheating.

(70) Serious plagiarism involves copied or appropriated work formed with the clear intention to deceive an assessor, premeditated cheating or other forms of misrepresentation. The effect of serious plagiarism is to compromise the assessment process.

(71) Sanctions can only be imposed in accordance with the Student Misconduct Regulations 2019 and following the Student Misconduct Procedure, having regard to natural justice requirements for students.

(72) Sanctions in response to plagiarism are detailed in Part 6 of the Student Misconduct Regulations 2019 and may include:

1. Zero marks for the assessment task;
2. Zero marks for the unit;
3. Suspension from the course;
4. Exclusion from the course.

How to record an educative response

(73) Academics who decide to deliver an educative response must make a note of:

1. The matter;
2. The response selected, and
3. The date it was given to the student on the Register of Academic Integrity Breaches.

(74) The centralised University Register is currently maintained by the Integrity Office. Instructions for submitting the information can be obtained from the Integrity Office.

How to pass on more serious matters to the student misconduct process

(75) The University will investigate allegations of serious academic integrity breaches which amount to academic misconduct. Investigation will be conducted in accordance with the processes established in the Student Misconduct Procedure or the misconduct processes established under the relevant industrial instrument for staff.

(76) A referral by a Senior Officer to the Student Misconduct Panel can be made by lodging a Student Misconduct referral form via the Integrity Office.

How to record breaches involving research

(77) Where the allegation involves a possible breach of the University's Research Integrity Policy and Procedures, the senior officer should notify VU Research as soon as possible. The senior officer will then consult VU Research regarding the seriousness of the alleged misconduct and the appropriate allocation of responsibilities in dealing with the matter under the Research Integrity Policy and Research Integrity Procedures.

Section 7 - Decision-Making Matrix

(78) In determining how to respond to a breach of academic integrity, staff should consider:

1. The nature of the breach;
2. The extent of the breach;
3. The experience level of the student;
4. Any relevant past behaviour of the student; and
5. Where it can be determined, the intent of the student.

(79) The matrix below provides some guidance regarding the decisions available for each type of academic integrity breach, and the questions that may assist staff in reaching them.

(80) Academic staff should use judgement in assessing the appropriate mix of factors to consider in line with the guidance below.

(81) Decision-makers for each kind of breach, and available responses, are indicated in the Authority column. These Authorities are derived from the Student Misconduct Regulations 2019. It is essential that individuals do not act in excess of their authority with respect to the responses selected.

(82) A full current list of VU's Senior Officers for the purposes of the Student Misconduct Regulations 2019 is available from the Integrity Office.

Academic Integrity Breach Response Chart