Exploring the Link Between Education, Governance Quality, and Academic Integrity: A Cross-Country Clustering Analysis

Given the increasing global concerns over academic dishonesty and its implications for institutional credibility, the relationship between education, governance quality, and academic integrity is a crucial study area. This study aims to examine how education levels and governance quality impact academic integrity by clustering countries based on key indicators such as expected years of schooling, mean years of schooling, rule of law index, and document similarity percentage (a proxy for plagiarism). The analysis includes data from over 100 countries, spanning both developing and developed nations, with indicators drawn from sources such as the UNDP Human Development Reports, the World Bank’s Rule of Law Index for the year 2022, and aggregated similarity scores from Plagiarism Checker X for the 01.02.2025. These indicators were selected to represent educational attainment, institutional governance quality, and observed academic originality, allowing for a multidimensional statistical clustering approach. The k-means clustering algorithm was applied to identify natural groupings of countries, with the optimal number of clusters determined using the elbow method, silhouette scores, and Davies-Bouldin index to ensure robustness. Using k-means clustering, the research identifies two distinct country groups and analyses their characteristics to explore systemic influences on academic behaviours. The findings reveal that nations with higher education levels and more substantial governance structures exhibit lower similarity percentages, indicating more extraordinary originality and stronger academic integrity practices. Conversely, countries with lower education levels and weaker governance tend to have higher similarity percentages, suggesting challenges in upholding academic integrity. These results highlight the need for targeted interventions to improve governance and educational policies to strengthen academic integrity globally.