09/09/2025

Assessing Your Academic Integrity Office

by Courtney Cullen

Image credit: Stuart Miles, StockVault.net. (Commercial License to use this work for commercial, personal and educational purposes, without attribution - to use without attributing the original author)

Why We Assess

Assessment is often viewed with dread. One more task on your never ending to do list that administrators want you to submit every year. With increasing caseloads and no real use of the data you collect, you may be wondering why it matters. If this is you, you are not alone. Let’s look at how we may alter your assessment cycle to benefit your office and build change around your campus culture of integrity.

The first thing to remember is that assessment is a cycle, not a single to do list. We assess to see where we are, make a change, and check to see if that change had an impact. Then, we do it all again. The cycle can, at its core, be broken into five main areas:

The cycle may seem overwhelming, time consuming, and labor intensive. Building out your initial plan may take some time at the front end, but once you get into the groove, it can be easy to adjust year to year. Let’s start by building you a strong plan with some examples.

Determine Outcomes

Outcomes look at what your office hopes to achieve. They should be based on your mission and directly related to the work that you do. For example, if your mission is to educate students and adjudicate allegations, then you should have two outcomes, one related to student education and another to adjudication. Examples of outcomes include:

Students will be able to explain what academic integrity means at Sample University.

Reported cases of academic misconduct will be resolved fairly within a reasonable time.

The first example is a Student Learning Outcome (SLO) and the second is an Administrative Outcome (AO). Both are relevant for an Academic Integrity Office, and both can provide you with great information about the productivity of your office. They can also be used to justify requests for increased funding for interventions that target better results.

Identify Measures

Each outcome must be measured in some way, shape, or form. Measures can look different, and there should be at least two measures for each outcome to allow you to see the outcome from different angles. This helps you better understand what is going on in your office and how to tackle challenges you may be facing. Some examples of measures for our sample outcomes are below:

Students will be able to explain what academic integrity means at Sample University.

1. Academic Integrity Module: The academic integrity module provided by the Office of Academic Integrity is one measure of students being able to explain academic integrity. There is a pre-test and post-test for the module that asks questions about the definitions of academic integrity, has students explain academic misconduct, and explanations of the academic misconduct adjudication process.
2. Post-Infraction Education: Students that acknowledge their academic misconduct attend an academic integrity seminar. They write a reflection at the end of the seminar, explaining how their perceptions of academic integrity have changed after going through the process at Sample University. The reflections are assessed on a four-point scale, and students that do not score a minimally proficient are required to attend the seminar again. The scale is as follows: fails to meet expectations, minimally meets expectations, meets expectations, exceeds expectations.
3. Course evaluations ask students if they understand what it means to be academically honest in the course/if the faculty member has adequately explained how to submit work in a way that aligns with the academic integrity standards at Sample University. The evaluations use a five-point Likert scale.

Reported cases of academic misconduct will be resolved fairly within a reasonable time.

1. The number of days from case reporting to initial meetings shows how quickly the Academic Integrity Office can respond to instructor concerns.
2. The number of days from case reporting to case closure shows the timing of a case of possible academic misconduct.
3. The number of appeals submitted represents how students view the fairness of the process.
4. Students and instructors that go through the academic misconduct process are sent a follow-up survey that asks about their experience. The survey asks respondents how much they agree with the following statements using a four-point Likert scale from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree

As you can see, there are many ways to think about measures, from student work to surveys of students and faculty, even just simple counts of days. There are many avenues of data that can help you get a feel for what is occurring in your unit. Be creative. Odds are, you are already collecting the information you need in some capacity, assessment just provides you the chance to use the data you already have!

Establish Targets

Once you have determined what you will use to measure your outcomes, you need to set a goal, or target to reach. For example, how many students will complete the module and what change do you hope to see in the quizzes for students complete it? You may expect 75% of students to score 80% or higher on the post-quiz, or you may expect a 20% increase in scores for 90% of students between the pre-quiz and the post-quiz. Either way, your target is based on your data and your programming. You want a target to be a SMART goal: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely. That said, it is still a goal, so do not give in to the temptation to undersell your office. If the target for the number of days is a median of 10 business days from case reporting to case closure, you give yourself the ability to navigate closing cases earlier but also account for the way an appeal may drag your case out for months. One way to develop your targets is to determine a baseline; in other words, see where your measures are at now and use it to formulate a goal.

Collect & Analyze Data

Now that you have your assessment plan, it’s time to do the work. Over the course of your academic year, collect the data you need for your measures. If you have an academic integrity module on the LMS, pull the data at the end of each semester. Similarly, run a monthly report on your case information that gives you insight on case closure or fairness in procedure. You can either store this information for analysis in one go, which will take longer in the future. Or, you can run some analysis each time you collect the data and compile it in a report as you go. Either way, you’ll want to look at your data and provide results that list the number of respondents/cases and the average/median score relative to your measures. These numbers should be reported, and there should

Plan for Continuous Improvement

You’ve collected and analyzed the data, now is when you use that data. If you met your targets, congrats and well done! Let’s look at those targets and see how we can improve them. If you failed to meet the target, let’s try to figure out what stopped you from reaching those goals. Were you short, but still showing improvement? If so, your intervention may just need more time. If you were shorter than expected and not showing improvements or even showing worse results than the year before, then it may be time to introduce a new intervention. Let’s look at a way to continuously improve for each of these potential outcomes for the case closure example:

Met and/or exceeded targets

The Academic Integrity Office had a median case closure time of 9 business days, closing more cases under the 10-day goal. For cycles, we will set our target to maintain the 9 business day median between case reporting and case closure, regardless of case load for the academic year.

Did not meet targets, but improved from previous years

The Academic Integrity Office had a median case closure time of 12 business days, this is higher than the 10-day goal. However, this is down from the 13 business day median in previous years, and we had a 15% increase in case load from the previous cycle. This indicates that the additional staff member is increasing productivity, especially given the increased case load. We will continue to monitor this measure for the next assessment cycle and will keep the current target.

Did not meet targets and decreased from previous years

The Academic Integrity Office had a median case closure time of 13 business days, this is higher than the 10-day goal. However, this is up from the 11 business day median in previous years, and we had a 15% increase in case load from the previous cycle. This indicates that the case load is too high for the number of staff currently employed in the Academic Integrity Office. The AIO is using this data to request additional support. If support is provided, we will monitor for an additional cycle before adjusting a target. If support is not provided, the target time to case closure will be increased to 12 business days to account for both the increase in case load and the workload that is more realistic for the AIO staff.

Assessment is Empowerment

This blog is a limited look at how assessment can support the initiatives of any Academic Integrity unit. You should work with the Institutional Effectiveness Office to build an assessment strategy that is tailored to your institutional context. Even in this limited context, you can see how using the data you collect can provide the basis for institutional support. Instead of your unit being black box where its internal workings are unknown or inaccessible, and it is understood and analyzed based solely on its inputs and outputs, an assessment plan shows peaks under the hood and gives you a true frame of reference for the successes and challenges of your unit. When you embrace assessment, you open the door to possibilities.

Courtney Cullen, Ph.D., is an ICAI Board Member. She works as an assessment practitioner and academic integrity researcher.

The authors' views are their own.

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