Takeout: Comparing 2025 and 2026 Tracey Bretag Prize nominations reveals a sector-wide shift in educational integrity practice: from policy, awareness and misconduct management — to assessment design, evidence of learning, and global capability-building. Nominations close in three weeks.
ANALYSIS — PROF TRACEY BRETAG PRIZE 2026
What this year's educational integrity nominations reveal: the sector has moved from policing to assessment design.
Year on year, there are four fundamental shifts.
And 2026 nominations are still open.
2 nomination years compared | 6 regions represented | 6th Annual Prize
The Prof Tracey Bretag Prize was established with Tracey before her passing, and is a commitment we will continue to make each year.
The Prize ($5,000 or local currency equivalent, issued to multiple regions around the world) recognises scaled, measurable interventions that support educational integrity in higher education, anywhere in the world.
Reading the 2026 nominations against the full 2025 pool, four shifts are clear:
SHIFT 01
From rules to design.
In 2025, nominations centred on institutional response: AI policies, interim statements, awareness weeks, compliance modules. In 2026, integrity is engineered "upstream" - i.e. built into the assessment brief, the curriculum map, and the design workflow itself. One nomination explains: originality became a property of the enquiry, not the report.
SHIFT 02
Detection has largely disappeared from nominations.
The 2025 pool included some exam security, enforcement frameworks and case-management reform. In 2026: there are no detection, surveillance or misconduct-processing projects nominated. The question has moved from “did they cheat?” to “can we evidence the learning?”
SHIFT 03
Students as agents, not audience.
Where 2025 treated students as recipients of campaigns and modules, 2026 nominations feature student-led boards, student-authored research, and assessment where every learner generates original evidence - that is - integrity as ownership, not compliance.
SHIFT 04
Integrity has gone global, and is more networked.
2025 nominations were dominated by single institutions in mature systems. Already in 2026, nominations span ASEAN, the Gulf, Southeast Asia, the UK, Australia and the Anglophone Caribbean. In several, the network itself is positioned as the intervention: cross-border training, regional communities, integrity capability built where no formal infrastructure existed.
Who should you nominate?
If the work is scaled, measurable, and supports students to do — and evidence — their own learning, it belongs in this pool. That includes:
☐ Assessment and curriculum designers
☐ Educators, professional staff, and learning technologists
☐ Student leaders and regional networks
Self-nominations are welcome and are often some of the most exceptionally well evidenced. So are nominations of a colleague whose work deserves to be seen.
Nominations close in three weeks.
Named for, and in collaboration with, researcher and friend Professor Tracey Bretag, whose scholarship reframed educational integrity as a pedagogical responsibility rather than a policing exercise, the Prize exists so the sector can learn and scale what works.
If that describes your work, or someone else’s, please nominate now, before the deadline of 14 August 2026.
Nominate now: studiosity.com/tracey
