Cybersecurity: The Next Defense Against Academic Misconduct?

Until very recently, responsibility for the information security of an organization lay with a single person or small team embedded in the organization’s information technology (IT) department. It formed a small subset of other IT functions such as networking, software and hardware management, and end user requirements and was of little interest to anyone outside of that group. But as data becomes more and more valuable to nefarious entities and attack vectors become increasingly inventive and sophisticated, approaches to cybersecurity have evolved. It now takes a much greater role in the strategic approach of an organization. Every end user is responsible for security at least to some degree, and a layered approach is used to protect data and assets. The approach to academic integrity follows a similar pattern. Once of interest only to assessors, the far-reaching implications of academic misconduct are now much better understood. Yet responsibility for detecting academic misconduct still often falls to a single person, despite the varied methods of misconduct being used. Text-matching tools form just a small part of the detection methods that can be deployed, and detection could, and should take a multilayered approach. The authors propose that the lessons learned from the field of cybersecurity provide a useful insight into the approaches that could be taken to improving academic integrity, and that techniques used to protect the data of higher education institutions could also be adapted to help detect academic misconduct. Finally, the appropriateness of using these techniques will be discussed.