Ethical Guidelines

Ethics and Malpractices Statement

The Journal of Educational Evaluation & Standards (JEES) is committed to the highest standards of ethical conduct at every stage of the publication process. All parties—authors, editors, and reviewers—are expected to conform to these standards. By combining rigorous peer review with careful editorial judgment, JEES performs an intellectual gatekeeping function and accepts for publication only work of the highest scholarly quality and relevance to educational evaluation and standards. The following statement sets out the specific responsibilities of all parties to ensure compliance with internationally accepted guidelines, with particular attention to the distinctive ethical issues that arise in research on measurement, evaluation, and standard-setting.

Responsibilities of the Editors
Editors assess submissions exclusively on scholarly merit, including significance, timeliness, relevance, originality, methodological rigor, and clarity; editorial decisions are not influenced by an author’s gender, race, orientation, ethnicity, language, nationality, religion, or institutional affiliation. Editors are responsible for the integrity of the scholarly record, issuing corrections or retractions when required and investigating suspected misconduct. Editorial staff keep all submission information confidential and disclose it only to the corresponding author, editorial personnel, potential peer reviewers, advisers, and the publisher as necessary. Unpublished materials disclosed in a submission may not be used in editors’ own research without explicit written consent from the authors. Prior to external review, editors ensure that language quality, formatting, and all required declarations (ethics approvals and consent, data availability, conflicts of interest, funding sources, and CRediT contributions) are in place. JEES operates double-blind peer review; editors ensure a fair and appropriate process by selecting reviewers with complementary expertise spanning measurement/evaluation and standards/policy (or the focal domain), including, where appropriate, a reviewer familiar with the study’s country or regional context, and by arranging review by not fewer than three experts of international standing so that technical and standards-practice perspectives are both represented. Submissions with conflicts of interest involving an editor are handled by another editor; editor-authored papers are assigned independently. Research involving human participants, sensitive data, or applications with impact on educational communities must meet appropriate ethical standards and provide documentation. Final publication decisions are made by the Editor-in-Chief after consulting editors, advisers, and reviewers.

Responsibilities of the Reviewers
Reviewers who feel unqualified or unable to provide a timely review should notify the editors and decline the invitation. Manuscripts under review are confidential documents; evaluations should be objective, clearly reasoned, and address both technical soundness and ethical implications. Reviewers should identify relevant work not cited—particularly studies that connect measurement methods with standards, accreditation, or quality assurance—and must not use unpublished material from a manuscript in their own research without written permission from the authors. Reviewers remain alert to privacy and consent issues, potential harms or discrimination, and to fairness concerns in measurement and algorithms, including measurement invariance, differential item functioning, automated scoring, test security, and the appropriate limits of remote proctoring; they also consider potential systemic biases and implications for learners and educational communities.

Responsibilities of the Publisher
In cases of alleged or proven misconduct, fraudulent publication, or plagiarism, the publisher—working closely with the editors—will take appropriate steps to clarify the situation and amend the record, including issuing a correction, clarification, expression of concern, or retraction as warranted. The publisher is committed to long-term availability and preservation through partnerships and digital archiving, and will promptly correct inaccuracies or misleading statements in published articles. All complaints are forwarded to the Editor-in-Chief for thorough investigation, regardless of the complainant’s identity. Authors are responsible for professional language editing before submission, for complying with APA (latest edition) in citations and references, and for ensuring consistency between in-text citations and the reference list. The corresponding author must confirm that the work is original and not under consideration elsewhere, disclose all potential conflicts of interest and funding sources, ensure the absence of plagiarism or inappropriate similarity with proper attribution of all borrowed ideas and data, and provide complete affiliation information for all authors. Once under review at JEES, the manuscript should not be submitted elsewhere unless formally rejected; authors provide the necessary publication authorization for JEES to disseminate the article and essential derivative versions (such as translations) and adhere fully to the Author Guidelines. Authors must clearly describe data sources and how data were collected, processed, and analyzed; disclose methodological and technological limitations, potential biases, and limits to generalizability; confirm ethics approvals and informed consent for studies involving human participants or human data; discuss ethical implications for individuals, communities, and society; and, where applicable, explain the safeguards used to uphold fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics in applications.

Special Considerations for Educational Evaluation & Standards
JEES encourages transparency about methods, data, and limitations to enable understanding and potential replication. Authors should address bias and fairness in educational systems and datasets, especially when assessments, automated scoring, or monitoring technologies affect student populations, and should describe procedures for detecting and mitigating such biases. Research using human data must comply with applicable privacy laws and ethical standards, paying particular attention to re-identification risks and data minimization. Studies of human interaction with assessment technologies must ensure informed consent, participant privacy, and attention to psychological or social impact. Cross-cultural and multilingual work should demonstrate cultural sensitivity and provide evidence for translation, adaptation, and comparability. Authors are expected to consider broader socio-technical consequences of evaluation and standards implementation—including implications for educational systems, access and credentialing equity, labor markets, and cultural practices—and to engage with ethical frameworks from education and the relevant human sciences. JEES is committed to fostering responsible research at the intersection of educational evaluation and standards, with attention to methodological rigor and to the ethical and societal implications of this work.