Linking Quality, Standards, and Integrity

In this introductory chapter to the section about quality assurance and policies relating to academic integrity, it will be argued that a lax approach to integrity, in education or research, undermines the reliability of academic credentials or research findings. The implication from this premise is that standards will suffer if integrity is not taken seriously, resourced, and supported. Ideally, academic and research integrity should underpin quality assurance and academic standards. Research undertaken in recent years by the author with various colleagues confirms that, although the importance of taking a quality and standard approach to integrity is growing among the global community of researchers in this field, there is not yet universal adoption of the need for linking academic quality and standards with academic integrity. This introduction sets the scene for the chapters in this section. It also refers to chapters elsewhere in the handbook that have relevance to the same theme. Most of these chapters report on the progress made nationally or regionally in addressing academic integrity through national and institutional policies. The section also includes important chapters about developments on a global scale, explaining how networking and other initiatives help expose and improve integrity and fight malpractice and corruption relating to the quality and standards of education and research.