As part of a holistic institution approach to addressing academic integrity, University of Wollongong has developed and implemented a centralised system to manage academic misconduct cases. The centralised system was designed to replace ad hoc faculty based systems, prone to duplication of data and inconsistencies in coding and measurement. The complicated nature of the paper based system placed a heavy time and administrative burden on academic and professional staff, which discouraged some levels of reporting.
The system was designed to interface with existing student datasets, improving accuracy, saving time through pre-population of student, subject and assessment information, in addition to having policy timeframes, delegation, and escalation workflows built in.
Like other technology based systems related to academic integrity, insights can be drawn from the information both from what is reported, in terms of cases, assessment types and how cases are managed, and what is not reported, for example some assessment types, disciplines of study and who is not reporting cases.
The system was introduced at the end of 2017, and has produced 18 months of data. This paper discusses the design considerations, benefits and insights gained from the process, in addition what has been learned from introducing a centralised electronic system to manage academic misconduct cases.