In 2019, Internal Audit completed a review of Academic Integrity at RMIT and made a series of recommendations to improve the University’s ability to respond to emerging challenges in this area that are prevalent across the sector. Three of the audit recommendations involved establishing an Academic Integrity Policy and Procedure to encapsulate: principles, values, staff and student roles and responsibilities, key concepts (including academic integrity), prescribe expected behaviours, connect breaches with compliance process, and provide best practice approaches to identify manage and prevent breaches.

A structure for the Academic Integrity Policy and Procedure was considered and endorsed by Academic Board in November 2019 following sector benchmarking to determine best practice institutional approaches to academic integrity.

The Academic Integrity Policy and Procedure: defines key concepts, promotes a positive culture of academic integrity, establishes staff roles and responsibilities, links significant academic integrity breaches to misconduct processes, prescribes key preventative measures across the organisation to avoid breaches of academic integrity, and articulates processes and provides tools for managing breaches of academic integrity inclusive of educative and best practice approaches.

The Academic Integrity Policy sets out key principles to guide a whole of institution approach to upholding academic integrity and managing associated issues. This is achieved through consideration of learning and teaching practices, early intervention processes, and proactive detection of breaches and enforcement mechanisms. In addition to principles, the policy outlines actions and behaviours that constitute breaches of academic integrity, and provides guidance on how each should be addressed having regard to the circumstances and additional factors including the primacy of an educative response, and the student’s experiences across their learning journey.

Research integrity is recognised as a distinct subset of academic integrity in the policy, and as such breaches are managed in accordance with the Research Policy and the Management of Breaches of Research Integrity Procedure, in conjunction with the Student Conduct Policy as appropriate.


Clauses Amended:Policy: All