Courtney Cullen, director of assessment in Institutional Effectiveness at NC State, has been named the Donald McCabe Research of the Year for 2025 by the International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI). This award recognizes and honors outstanding recent research projects regarding academic integrity during the past year or more, as well as Cullen’s tremendous contributions to promoting academic integrity on NC State’s campus and beyond.
“Courtney’s recognition speaks volumes about the respect she has earned from colleagues and peers,” said Kaitlyn Mittan, NC State’s executive director of assessment and accreditation. “These efforts do not go unnoticed, and they embody NC State’s mission and the core values that ICAI seeks to promote worldwide.
The ICAI was founded in 1992 by Don McCabe, a professor at Rutgers University, to combat cheating, plagiarism and academic dishonesty in higher education. The organization seeks to cultivate cultures of integrity in higher education academic communities around the world. The organization primarily focuses on six “fundamental values of academic integrity”: honesty, trust, fairness, respect, responsibility and courage.
Cullen joined NC State in September of 2025. Previously, she served as the Quality Enhancement Plan assessment manager at Georgia Tech, where she first started working in higher education assessment. Prior to that, she worked in academic integrity at the University of Georgia.
Cullen’s research culminated in the paper: Inconsistent Access, Uneven Approach: Ethical Implications and Practical Concerns of Prioritizing Legal Interests over Cultures of Academic Integrity, co-authored by Cullen and Greer Murphy and published in the Journal of Academic Ethics. The research summarized in the paper examines surmises that academic integrity policies in the United States have not been studied as in Australia (Bretag & Mahmud, 2016; Bretag et al., 2011), Europe (Foltýnek & Glendinning, 2015; Glendinning, 2013), or Canada (Eaton et al., 2022; Stoesz & Eaton, 2020).
The study examines how elements of exemplary policy are supported, or not, by higher education institutions in the United States. Academic integrity policies across a range of institution types and locations must be updated to more clearly reflect elements of exemplary policy and, thereby, to better practice as well as preach our academic ethics in upholding institutional policies.
Currently, Cullen is working on developing more tools for institutions to self-assess. The ability to review and reflect critically on policies helps institutions better serve their stakeholders. Throughout this reflection process, Cullen wants administrators to know that a bad review doesn’t necessarily equal bad news — it just means there is more work to do in certain areas, along with opportunities to explore and expand policies.
“I’m focused on helping the ICAI develop assessment tools to provide to academic institutions,” said Cullen. “We recently completed a validation study of the academic integrity rating system, which is an assessment tool for campuses to see how their integrity climates are. The piece that we received the award for relates to academic integrity policies across the United States, and is the first comprehensive study of these policies that’s been done in the country.”
At NC State, academic officers can review the results of Cullen’s research to serve as a sort of pulse check on what works and areas for improvement in the realm of academic integrity and related policies. Cullen hopes her work guides next steps in strengthening NC State’s comprehensive approach to these types of issues and opportunities.
Cullen, who has been involved with ICAI since 2018, said it has been rewarding to see the research grow into work that could benefit colleges and universities beyond NC State. She hopes institutions use the ICAI policy research as an opportunity to critically evaluate their own academic integrity policies and consider how they can improve processes for students, faculty and staff while better supporting the overall goals of academic integrity work.
“We want to give institutions like NC State practical tools to improve policy decisions while protecting students’ due process rights and ensuring their voices are included. Our project builds on this by developing a self-assessment rubric institutions can use to evaluate and continuously improve their own policies,” said Cullen.
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