Performance evaluation considering academic misconduct of China’s higher education institutions

Performance evaluation is essential for managing and allocating resources in higher education institutions (HEIs), guiding their development. However, in the current evaluation system, the growing issue of academic misconduct (AM) as an undesirable output in research assessments is highly overlooked. To fill this gap, we propose the creative inclusion of AM as an undesirable output in the evaluation system. To validate the potentially questionable nature of the evaluation system without AM, we took China’s 32 HEIs within the period of 2016–2018 as an example, separately calculating efficiencies without and with AM through DEA approach. Then we use Wilcoxon test of paired samples and Pearson correlation coefficient confirming that there are increasingly significant differences between the two efficiencies and the two rankings in the sample period, respectively. Therefore, we believe that other performance evaluations for HEIs that do not incorporate AM are likely to be questionable, such as the influencing factors of research efficiency and returns to scale (RTS). Incorporating AM into the evaluation index system, we further explore the influencing factors of research efficiency in sample HEIs through Tobit regression model. Then we propose innovative models tailored specifically for analyzing RTS of HEIs in which undesirable outputs are under extended strong disposability and apply them to the empirical study of China’s HEIs. The results show that (1) AM is playing an increasingly prominent role in the research efficiency evaluation of HEIs; (2) local economic development, external exchanges and emphasis on AM in HEIs can improve research efficiency; however, government funding has a negative effect on it while the effect of human capital is not significant; (3) the investment scale in most China’s HEIs is optimize or excessive.