Ensuring Academic Data Integrity in Higher Education Using Blockchain Technology

This paper investigates the application of blockchain technology to fortify academic data integrity across higher education institutions, confronting longstanding vulnerabilities including record falsification, diploma forgery, disjointed oversight mechanisms, and deficient traceability in legacy centralized platforms. Informed by emerging scholarship on verifiable credentials and decentralized architectures, it dissects the frailties inherent in conventional student management systems and introduces a theoretical model that synchronizes blockchain tenets such as immutability, distributed consensus, and executable contracts with core integrity tenets like verifiability, indisputability, auditability, and selective disclosure. The model specifies a consortium-based platform for governing transcripts, qualifications, assessments, and extracurricular validations, harmonized with incumbent institutional databases and aligned with data sovereignty standards like GDPR and FERPA. Scenario-driven assessments reveal substantial uplifts in inter-institutional confidence, streamlined authentication workflows, and immutable provenance logging, coupled with tangible gains in operational economies and expedited record dissemination to accreditors and recruiters. The inquiry candidly appraises impediments to viability, encompassing throughput constraints, cross-jurisdictional compatibility, cultural resistance within academia, and emergent governance dilemmas, thereby framing blockchain as a sturdy scaffold for equitable and dependable scholarly recordkeeping. It urges rigorous field trials to substantiate these claims amid heterogeneous educational landscapes.