Academic misconduct is a particular challenge for business higher education, described by Caldwell (2010) as at ‘crisis’ levels, with Sutton and Taylor (2011) reporting higher frequency of behaviours likely to lead to academic misconduct among business students compared to psychology students. Designers of Masters of Business Administration (MBA) programs face competing challenges: to provide opportunities for students to develop work-ready teamwork skills through collaborative learning activities while minimizing opportunities for academic misconduct associated with unequal participation in group-based assessments. To date, business education has addressed the problem of academic misconduct through training in academic integrity for students (e.g., Lavine & Roussin, 2012), with recent work suggesting that academics also need training in academic integrity (Ransome & Newton, 2018).
An alternative strategy is to design assessments that reduce opportunities for academic misconduct. For example, Bretag et al. (2019) from their survey of a large sample of Australian university students found that assessments rated as less likely to be associated with academic misconduct included real world tasks, activities that were a small part of a nested task, in-class tasks, personalised and unique tasks, and reflections on practical placements. This paper presents a cross institutional project to develop a portfolio-based assessment framework for an MBA course that uses real world, nested, personalised tasks, and reflections on practical placements to assure the development of work-ready skills in collaboration while minimising the possibility of academic misconduct and contract cheating.