Assessments support learning and frame how and what students learn. It also plays a central role in the certification of student nurses which is important to determine if  students have  the requisite knowledge and skills to become Registered Nurses. The inclusion of rubrics in assessments communicate expectations of assessments to students. A rubric can prompt students to address certain aspects of an assessment task they may not have thought to, and in this regard are a significant point of enactment. They also act as an invitation for students to work with the assessment criteria to understand how to complete the assessment task.

When preparing written assessment students are expected to undertake several actions to support their learning such as literature searching that uses nursing databases, reading published, current, peer reviewed evidence-based sources, paraphrasing this information, and attribute this work through correct citation practices.  However, these good academic behaviours are being challenged by the ease of access to a plethora of low-quality electronic information available via search engines such as Google, contract cheating services and more recently Generative AI. When students use these low-quality information sources to complete assessments their learning and potentially their integrity is jeopardised.

This project aims to espouse behaviours associated with academic success and integrity by rewarding them through the allocation of “ownership and integrity” marks in the assessment rubric. Marks were awarded for using robust literature searching methods, similarity index (from Turnitin) <15% and correct citation for at least 6 academic sources.