IB Authorisation Series, Part Two. The Academic Integrity Policy: Building a Culture That Makes the Document Unnecessary

What is the IB academic integrity policy, and what must it include? 

Every IB World School and candidate school must have a written academic integrity policy that reflects the school's commitment to honest intellectual work across all aspects of the programme. The policy must define what academic malpractice is, including plagiarism, collusion, duplication of work, and the misuse of artificial intelligence tools. It must describe the school's procedures for investigating suspected malpractice, the consequences that follow when malpractice is confirmed, and the responsibilities of students, teachers, and the DP coordinator in maintaining and enforcing academic integrity standards. It must also address how the school educates students about integrity principles and how it keeps that education current as the landscape, particularly around AI, continues to evolve. The IBO updated its Academic Integrity Policy in March 2023 with a new appendix specifically addressing AI tools, and further updated it in March 2025. Schools whose policies were written before these updates and have not been reviewed against current guidance are already behind.

That is the structural requirement. The more important question is what separates an academic integrity policy that actually reduces malpractice from one that documents the school's position on malpractice without changing anything about the conditions that produce it. That distinction is the one most schools miss, and it is where the real work of this policy lives.

Why Academic Integrity Is the Hardest Policy to Write Honestly

The assessment policy, which we examined in the first article of this series, tends to fail because it describes an assessment culture that does not yet fully exist. The academic integrity policy fails differently. Most schools that produce this document have a genuine, sincere commitment to honest student work. The policy failure is not one of values. It is one of architecture. The policy prohibits conduct without building the understanding that prevents it, announces consequences without creating the conditions under which integrity becomes the easier choice, and treats academic honesty as a rule to enforce rather than a capacity to develop.

The IBO defines academic misconduct as deliberate or inadvertent behaviour that has the potential to result in the student, or anyone else, gaining an unfair advantage in one or more components of assessment. The word 'inadvertent' in that definition carries significant weight that most schools do not build into their policy design. A student who paraphrases a source without attribution, who does not understand that paraphrasing requires acknowledgement as much as direct quotation does, who collaborates with a classmate on an internal assessment task in a way that crosses into collusion without recognising that they have done so — that student has committed academic malpractice under the IBO's definition regardless of their intent. The consequences fall on them regardless of their intent.

This is the foundational reason why an academic integrity policy that focuses primarily on consequences is inadequate. The students most likely to commit inadvertent malpractice are not the ones calculating whether the penalty is worth the risk. They are the ones who do not yet know what constitutes malpractice in the specific context they are working in. Protecting those students, and protecting the school from the reputational and operational damage that a malpractice investigation carries, requires a policy that is built backward from that student's knowledge gap, not forward from the disciplinary procedure that follows when the gap becomes visible in submitted work.

What the IBO Defines as Malpractice

The full taxonomy of malpractice under the IBO's current framework is worth stating clearly, because schools writing their first academic integrity policy sometimes produce a document that addresses plagiarism in detail while treating other forms of malpractice as afterthoughts.

The IBO identifies plagiarism, passing off another person's work as the candidate's own without referencing, including translated material, as a core form of malpractice. Collusion, presenting copied or duplicated work produced by another student as original or enabling someone else to do so, is separately identified. Examination misconduct, including taking prohibited items into an examination and disruptive behaviour, and sharing the contents of an examination within twenty-four hours of its sitting by any means, complete the primary categories. Duplication of work, submitting the same work for different assessment components or requirements, is a further category that catches students who submit an essay written for one subject to satisfy requirements in another.

Each of these requires specific treatment in the policy, not because the document needs to be exhaustive, but because students and teachers need clarity about where the boundaries lie in each category before those boundaries become relevant. The Extended Essay is where duplication questions most commonly arise because students researching a topic that crosses disciplines sometimes struggle to understand why they cannot use the same piece of analysis in their EE and in an internal assessment for a related subject. The policy that addresses this specifically, with a concrete example, teaches the principle more effectively than a general prohibition does.

Collusion in the DP Context: The Specific Risks Most Policies Underaddress

Collusion deserves particular attention in a Diploma Programme policy because the DP's structure creates specific conditions under which students face genuine confusion about where legitimate collaboration ends and academic malpractice begins.

DP students routinely work together. They study together, discuss their Extended Essay topics, share resources, and workshop each other's written drafts in informal settings. This is normal, educationally healthy behaviour that the programme encourages in the context of CAS and many classroom activities. The line between collaboration and collusion is not always obvious to a seventeen-year-old working under deadline pressure, and a policy that simply states that collusion is prohibited without explaining where legitimate collaboration ends has not done its job.

The specific scenarios worth building into the policy or the student education programme that surrounds it include: two students discussing their Extended Essay approaches in enough detail that significant structural similarities appear in the final work; students sharing draft IA sections with each other for feedback in ways that result in common passages; group work that was designed to produce individual outputs but produced outputs that share more than coincidental similarity. None of these scenarios involves a student deliberately setting out to deceive. All of them constitute malpractice under the IBO's definition if the resulting work advantages one student through another's contribution without acknowledgement. The school's policy needs to give students a usable framework for navigating these situations before they find themselves in one, not after.

The AI Question: Where the IBO Actually Stands

The IBO's position is explicit: it will not ban the use of AI tools, viewing them as a technology that will become part of everyday life in the way that spell checkers, translation software, and calculators have. The IBO's stated intention is to work with schools to help them support students on how to use these tools ethically in line with its principles of academic integrity. The critical line in the IBO's position is equally explicit: work produced by artificial intelligence tools, even only in part, will not be considered a student's own.

The IBO updated its Academic Integrity Policy to include a new appendix, Appendix 6, specifically providing guidance on the use of artificial intelligence tools, covering how schools should support students to use these tools ethically in line with IB principles. The March 2025 update extended this guidance further. The practical implication for schools is straightforward in principle and demanding in practice. AI tools are not prohibited. Using AI-generated content in assessed work without proper attribution is malpractice. And if students use the text or any other product produced by an AI tool, whether by copying, paraphrasing, or modifying an image, they must clearly reference the AI tool in the body of their work and in the bibliography.

The difficulty for schools is not understanding this principle. It is operationalising it in a way that is genuinely educational rather than merely regulatory. A policy that states AI must be referenced treats AI use as analogous to source citation, which is approximately correct but misses the more significant challenge: AI tools are available to students at every stage of the work, from initial brainstorming through to final drafting, and the question of what constitutes meaningful student authorship when AI has been involved at multiple stages is genuinely unresolved across the field of education, not just in IB schools.

The schools whose academic integrity policies handle AI most credibly are the ones that frame the issue not as a prohibition to enforce but as a question about learning to engage honestly with. What is the student's own thinking in this piece of work? What did the AI do that the student used, and what did the student do with what the AI produced? These questions, built into the ongoing supervision and check-in processes the IBO recommends, produce the kind of ongoing teacher-student dialogue that helps teachers understand each student's writing process, identify potential issues early, and guide students toward maintaining academic authenticity. That dialogue is the substance of an effective AI integrity practice. The policy statement is the frame around it.

The specific implication for DP coordinators is that the school's AI integrity approach needs to be built into the Extended Essay supervision process from the student's first meeting with their supervisor, not introduced at the final draft stage. A supervisor who has regular structured conversations with a student about their thinking and research process across the EE timeline has, by the time they sign the authentication statement, genuine evidence that the work represents the student's own intellectual development. A supervisor who meets with a student three times and reviews two drafts does not, in an environment where AI tools can produce a credible 4,000-word research essay in minutes. The policy can require regular supervisor meetings. It cannot guarantee that those meetings do what they need to do. Building that guarantee requires the coordinator to structure the supervision programme with the AI question explicitly in view.

Consequences: What the IBO Does and What the School Does

The consequence structure for academic malpractice in the DP operates at two levels that a well-constructed policy needs to keep clearly distinct.

At the school level, the policy describes internal consequences for malpractice, the sanctions the school applies to internal assessments, coursework, and non-examination work before it reaches the IBO. These are at the school's discretion within the boundaries the IBO sets, and they typically escalate from a warning and resubmission requirement for a first minor infraction through to significant academic penalties for repeated or serious misconduct.

At the IBO level, the stakes are substantially higher. When the IBO suspects malpractice, including collusion, copying, and plagiarism, it conducts an investigation. If the candidate is found guilty, consequences include no grade being awarded in the subject concerned and, therefore, no diploma being awarded. The DP coordinator has a mandatory obligation to report suspected malpractice to the IBO once work has been submitted, and an examiner, moderator, or detection software may also report possible misconduct during the marking process. This means the school is not the last line of oversight. The IBO's own moderation and examination processes provide an independent check, and a school that has not built genuine integrity practices cannot rely on its own internal investigation record as evidence that malpractice is not occurring.

The consequence most schools write about clearly is the grade penalty. The consequence most schools underwrite in their policies is the institutional consequence of a pattern of malpractice findings. A school whose students generate repeated malpractice investigations at the IBO level is a school whose programme evaluation will reflect that pattern, whose reputation in the university admissions market will be affected by it, and whose relationship with the IBO as an authorized institution is placed under scrutiny by it. The academic integrity policy is not only a student-facing document. It is part of the school's institutional accountability architecture, and the quality of practice it generates is visible to the IBO in ways that go well beyond a single investigation outcome.

The Education Programme the Policy Has to Support

The most consistently underdeveloped section of first-draft academic integrity policies is the one describing how the school teaches academic integrity rather than enforcing it. The IBO is explicit that this education needs to happen continuously across the programme, not in a single induction session at the start of Grade 11.

What effective academic integrity education looks like in practice is specific and worth describing. It begins in the first weeks of the DP with genuine, subject-specific conversations about what honesty means in different assessment contexts, what citation looks like in a History IA versus a Biology report versus a Visual Arts process journal, since the conventions are not uniform and students cannot be expected to know them intuitively. It continues in the Extended Essay supervision programme, where supervisors use check-in meetings to engage with students about their sources, their synthesis process, and their use of any AI tools, building a documented record of intellectual development that constitutes genuine evidence of student authorship. It runs through every subject's internal assessment preparation, where teachers explicitly discuss the boundary between using sources and depending on them and between legitimate peer feedback and collusion.

This education is not separate from the academic integrity policy. It is the policy's primary instrument. A prohibition without education is a rule that students violate from ignorance as often as from calculation. The schools that genuinely reduce malpractice are the ones that treat academic integrity as an intellectual value worth developing, not a boundary worth monitoring. Building that value requires consistent, specific, curriculum-embedded teaching about what honest intellectual work looks like in the DP, across two years, in every subject. The policy that describes this programme, names who delivers it, specifies when, and explains how it is reviewed is doing something qualitatively different from the policy that states the school is committed to academic integrity and describes the penalty matrix.

The Authentication Statement and What It Actually Requires

Every teacher who submits internal assessment work to the IBO signs an authentication statement confirming that the work is the student's own. In an environment of widely available AI tools, this statement requires a genuinely new level of evidential grounding. A teacher who can sign it confidently is a teacher who has been present in the student's intellectual process across the duration of the work, who has seen drafts develop, whose conversations with the student about their thinking are part of the record, and who can articulate specifically what makes the final submission the student's own in a meaningful sense. That is a different kind of authentication than reviewing a submitted draft and finding nothing obviously copied.

The academic integrity policy needs to address this directly. It should describe what the school's authentication practice looks like in each assessment context: the EE, the subject IAs, the TOK essay, and it should name the minimum process by which a teacher can have sufficient grounds to sign the statement honestly. A coordinator who builds this into the policy and then ensures teachers understand and follow it is building something the IBO's updated guidance on AI specifically calls for and something that no detection software alone can replace. The conversation between a teacher and a student about the student's own thinking is, in the current landscape, the most reliable authentication tool available. The policy that makes that conversation a structural requirement has understood what academic integrity actually demands in 2025.

The academic integrity policy, written and implemented well, is one of the most powerful instruments a DP school has for building the intellectual culture that the programme is designed to produce. Ameyaa works with candidate schools to develop policies that do that work and with authorised schools whose policies need to be genuinely reviewed against current IBO guidance, particularly around AI. If either description fits your school, we welcome that conversation.

References

International Baccalaureate Organization. (2019). Academic integrity. IBO.

International Baccalaureate Organization. (2023, March). Academic integrity policy: Appendix 6 — guidance on the use of artificial intelligence tools. IBO.

International Baccalaureate Organization. (2025, March). Academic integrity policy update. IBO.

International Baccalaureate Organization. (2020). Programme standards and practices. IBO.

International Baccalaureate Organization. (2024). Diploma Programme assessment procedures. IBO.

International Baccalaureate Organization. (n.d.). Artificial intelligence in IB assessment and education. IBO. https://ibo.org/programmes/artificial-intelligence-ai-in-learning-teaching-and-assessment/

International Baccalaureate Organization. (n.d.). Academic integrity concerns. IBO. https://www.ibo.org/contact-the-ib/feedback-and-concerns/academic-integrity-concerns/