Academic Integrity in South Asia: Focus on India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka

The concept of academic integrity (AI) is gaining momentum in many countries in the world. As an initiative to explore the measures taken by different countries to maintain AI, this chapter aims to review the educational system of India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, to elaborate their journey of enhancing academic integrity within higher education. Due to the complexities in the educational systems, a unified approach to efficiently implement any academic integrity policies coupled with proactively planned deterrence strategies against misconducts in these countries has been a challenge. However, individual governments have started addressing the issue by providing guidelines/policies against academic misconducts. Currently their focus is mainly on (a) taking measures against plagiarism (largely via punitive measures) and (b) higher education with the specific emphasis on doctoral studies. Institutions are now using some form of text-matching software (named as “plagiarism detection software”). There is overreliance on the text-matching software for determining penalties. In contrast, there is limited evidence of these initiatives being linked with or scaffolded by measures to educate students about academic integrity, scientific writing, referencing styles, or how to avoid plagiarism. This shows that these countries are at the beginning of their journey toward establishing integrity culture in all aspects of education. Considering this, it is now time to initiate the stakeholder involvement including educationists, university undergraduates, and the secondary schools. The universities ought to invest on establishing and delivering courses, workshop, and/or study materials for academic writing, ethics, and ethical behavior.