Congratulations to this year's 2025 Tracey Bretag Prize shortlist. And many thanks to our Academic Advisory Board who take on the tough task of scoring some of the world's most innovative educational integrity projects each year.
This year, a key theme - and Prize prompt - addressed Tracey's concern: "How can we keep academic integrity, humanity, and learning central to the student experience?"
This year:
- The RAINZ Collective from New Zealand (Asia-Pacific winner) conducted a nationwide survey on undergraduate academic integrity, using insights to drive policy revisions, establish communities of practice, and redesign assessments across all NZ universities.
- Prof Sarah Elaine Eaton and Dr Rahul Kumar (North America winner) at the University of Calgary and Brock University respectively, developed the "Postplagiarism" framework, redefining academic integrity in the AI age with six tenets, promoting ethical human-AI co-creation and valuing attribution.
- Dr Shiva Sivasubramaniam (UK winner) at the University of Roehampton established a Biomedical Science Academic Working Group to provide subject-specific AI ethics guidelines and conducted over 200 workshops globally, impacting universities worldwide.
What did they all have in common?
A strong focus on ethical AI integration, a proactive and educative approach to integrity, and demonstrable impact through collaborative efforts. Read more about their work, below.
Asia-Pacific - 2025 Tracey Bretag Prize Winner
NOMINEE / GROUP NAME: The RAINZ Collective, New Zealand
INSTITUTION: University of Auckland
PROJECT TITLE: Academic Misconduct Among Undergraduates Across Aotearoa: Insights and Implications for Policy and Practice
NOMINATION: The Research on Academic Integrity in New Zealand (RAINZ) Collective is a collaboration amongst all New Zealand universities. It aims to promote understanding of academic integrity nationally, and provide insights and opportunities to build cultures of integrity and positive learning and teaching experiences for students and staff across New Zealand.
After launching the first-ever nationwide New Zealand survey of undergraduate students’ perceptions, attitudes, and behaviours to academic integrity in 2022, RAINZ produced a collective national report, as well as individualised reports for each participating institution. Throughout 2024/2025 those reports were instrumental for these institutions to develop a range of interventions to advocate for and establish academic integrity policies, processes and education, including:
- Major revisions of policies, procedures and resources to establish principled, engaging, and proactively educative academic integrity frameworks, including GenAI.
- Formulation of Academic Integrity Communities of Practice within and across the institutions.
- The development of institutional academic integrity websites.
- Collaborative webinars on academic integrity.
- Assessment redesign.
Results from its pioneering research were published in the New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies in March 2024. Subsequently, insights of their research were presented to the Australasian Academic Integrity Forum in September 2024, at the ICAI International Day of Action for Academic Integrity in October 2024, and widely within these institutions to students, staff, and management.
The RAINZ Collective continues its research on academic integrity through national surveys on student and faculty perceptions of academic integrity and the use of GenAI, and collaboratively developing nationally consistent best practice policies, guidelines and resources.
North America - 2025 Tracey Bretag Prize Winner
NOMINEE / GROUP NAME: Sarah Elaine Eaton; Rahul Kumar
INSTITUTION: University of Calgary, University of Bricj
PROJECT TITLE: Postplagiarism: Academic Integrity in the Age of AI
NOMINATION: Definitions of, and attitudes about plagiarism have evolved over time. When the printing press was first invented, social response to plagiarism was ridicule, not retribution. “Cut-and-paste” plagiarism did not exist before the Internet. Artificial intelligence (AI) has changed writing and education forever. The post-plagiarism framework provides and opportunity to understand academic integrity that still maintain ethics as a foundation of education through six tenets: human-AI co-creation is becoming normal; human creativity is not threatened by AI; AI offers us ways to transcend language barriers; we can relinquish control but not responsibility; attribution remains important; and historical approaches to plagiarism may require rethinking.
The framework has been translated into half a dozen languages and discussed in mainstream publications such Times Higher Ed (Kenny, 2024), the Lancet (Bagenal, 2024), as well as University World News (2023) as well as in scholarly publications (e.g., Kumar, 2025). See: www.Postplagiarism.com.
Helping students and educators use AI ethically while still valuing writing, learning, attribution are central to postplagiarism, This work disrupts strictly punitive approaches to misconduct while valuing students’ development of ethical use of AI as a critical skill for learning and preparation for the workforce.
As a result of this work, there are now graduate students framing their own research around postplagiarism (Healy, 2024; Ramazanov, 2025). As the next generation of scholars, educators and decision-makers, students taking up postplagiarism as a guiding framework for future-focused learning and integrity shows the impact and sustainability of this work."
Europe & UK - 2025 Tracey Bretag Prize Winner
NOMINEE / GROUP NAME: Dr Shiva Das Sivasubramaniam
INSTITUTION: University of Roehampton
PROJECT TITLE: UK-Biomedical Science Academic Working Group on integrity and Ethical Engagement with GenAI
NOMINATION: I established this UK-based Biomedical Scientist Working Group in 2024 to provide subject specific guideline/training for ethics and integrity focussing on AI. This idea resulted after collaborating in European Network for Academic integrity (ENAI) since 2016 and working closely with international partners to organize subject specific training, curating integrity awareness programs for students & academics, authoring reports/guidelines, and delivering international summer schools. Since 2016, I successfully run over 200 worldwide workshops, enhancing integrity and ethical behaviour in HE and beyond.
Last year, by establishing this UK-group, I focussed on academic training, supporting the biomedical science community, (including faculty, students, and management) for effective and ethical use of AI. In July, the Royal Society of Biology funded me to deliver workshop for UK bioscience academics recognising this group’s activities. My assessment guidelines for effective deployment AI for students/academics were identified as innovative approach and incorporated into ENAI web page in October 2024, for the use of 62 member universities. Also, I organised ENAI conference, delivered several student PhD summer schools/academic training sessions in UK, Turkey, Caribbean, Georgia and Germany. These were recognised by the ENAI awarding me the outstanding member of integrity in July 2024 for my contributions for implementation of best practices in academic integrity, with demonstrable impact across higher education worldwide. Other evidence of impact includes positive feedback from training sessions, further requests to deliver events/projects (successful AI Literacy project funded by Dubai RDI Grant) and marked improvement in applying academic integrity in AI use by students and academics.
This fifth annual 2025 Prize continues our promise to a world-leading integrity researcher and friend - Professor Tracey Bretag. The Prize's purpose is to advocate for, and provide a platform for, the pursuit of academic integrity as part of a positive teaching and learning experience.
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