Introduction: Academic integrity is the expectation that members of the academic community, including researchers, teachers, and students, to act with accuracy, honesty, fairness, responsibility, and respect. Academic integrity is an issue of critical importance to academic institutions and has been gaining increasing interest among scholars in the last few years. While contravening academic integrity is known as academic misconduct, cheating is one type of academic misconduct and is generally defined as “any action that dishonestly or unfairly violates rules of research or education. Case study: The case study presented in this paper describes the elements of academic misconduct in three Middle Eastern countries (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan). Four categories of factors were analyzed, namely personal, cultural traits, contextual, and institutional. Moreover, a comparison of factors of misconduct is conducted in the three countries in order to examine how different learning environments and cultures can affect academic cheating. The study also investigates the role of teachers and administration system in enforcing integrity policy in educational institutes. Discussion and evaluation: An evaluation of the main causes of cheating and plagiarism among students in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan is conducted by analyzing students’ response to a 20 questions survey. The nonparametric Dunn’s statistical analysis is performed to compare the variance and frequency of factors that may affect academic integrity. The significant results are reported in terms of the Krushal F statistic and p-value < 0.05. The evaluation was a useful process that demonstrated the main factors affecting academic integrity in the three countries. Conclusion: Survey results show that the role of individual social-demographic and culture factors are significant for predicting misconduct in Saudi Arabia and Egypt but not in Jordan. Most students blamed their misconduct on laziness and willingness to achieve higher education performance. Students are more likely to cheat and plagiarize because they lack the ability or information to tackle assignments. Results illustrate that the cultural impact can be a significant factor in academic misconduct. Integrity policies and the level, at which they have been applied, have a large impact on student attitudes towards cheating and their academic misconduct.

This study covers various aspects of the aerosol distribution and characteristics, namely, optical depth climatology, absorption characteristics, and their microphysical properties over four regions in Saudi Arabia using satellite and ground observations including MODIS/Terra and Aqua, OMI, MISR/Terra, AERONET, and CALIPSO for the period April 2003–January 2013. The study includes cities in the North Western, Western, Eastern provinces of Saudi Arabia and in the Rub al Khali desert or Empty Quarter. Satellite and ground observations showed that the dust season extends from April to August with prominent peaks yet with high anthropogenic contribution late summer and early fall. Analysis shows an increase in the aerosol concentration during March 2009 which could be attributed to a major dust storm during that time. Comparing the AOD time series over regions 1–3 and region 4 (desert) we observe monthly and annual variability with no recurrence pattern over the years. The Aqua Deep Blue AOD₅₅₀data shows a single peak pattern that occurs over region 4 during the spring season known for its frequent dust events. OMI data shed the light on the presence of higher air pollution levels over region 3, representing the oil rich eastern province of Saudi Arabia.

Comparative analysis of Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR), Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), and Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) aerosol optical depth (AOD) products is performed over seven AERONET stations located in the Middle East and North Africa for the period of 2000–2015. Sites are categorized into dust, biomass burning, and mixed aerosol conditions. MISR and MODIS AOD agree during high-dust seasons but MODIS tends to underestimate AOD during low-dust seasons. Over dust-dominated sites, MODIS/Terra AODs indicate a negative trend over time, while MODIS/Aqua, MISR, and AERONET depict a positive trend. A deviation between MODIS/Aqua and MODIS/Terra was observed regardless of the geographic location and data sampling. The performance of MODIS is similar over the entire region with ∼64 % of AOD within the $\mathrm{\Delta }\mathit{\tau }=\pm \mathrm{0.05}\pm \mathrm{0.15}{\mathit{\tau }}_{\mathrm{AERO}}$ confidence range. MISR AOD retrievals fall within 84 % of the same confidence range for all sites examined here. Both MISR and MODIS capture aerosol climatology; however few cases were observed where one of the two sensors better captures the climatology over a certain location or AOD range than the other sensor. AERONET Level 2.0 version 3, MODIS Collection 6.1, and MISR V23 data have been used in analyzing the results presented in this study.

Mecca and Madinah are two holy cities where millions of people in general, visit throughout the years, during Hajj (Muslim's pilgrimage) time number of people visit these holy cities from different parts of the world is very high. However, the Government of Saudi Arabia only allowed 1000 pilgrims during the 2020 Hajj especially when the world is suffering from COVID-19. In the present paper, a detailed analysis of air quality parameters available from ground measurements have been carried over major cities of Saudi Arabia, Mecca, Madinah, and Jeddah from June to September 2019 and 2020. At Mecca and Jeddah, PM₁₀, NO₂ and CO concentrations are found to be higher in comparison to stations located close to Madinah. In addition, meteorological parameters, temperature, relative humidity, and wind directions are also analysed to understand changes associated with the meteorological parameters. Our detailed analysis shows a reduction in concentrations of pollutants during the 2020 Hajj, when the lockdown was observed in Saudi Arabia due to COVID-19. During June–August 2020 lockdown period, no major changes in PM₁₀ concentration was observed since there were frequent dust events were observed. In contrast, our results show 44% reduction in NO₂ (8.77 ppbv in 2019 to 4.97 ppbv in 2020) and 16% reduction in CO (0.85 ppm in 2019 to 0.72 ppm in 2020) concentrations during COVID-19 restrictions. The concentrations of NO₂ and CO do not cause any issue for the air quality as NO₂ and CO Indices lie within the green band (Air quality index 0–50). In Mecca, Madinah and Jeddah, the air quality is generally affected during Hajj, but during 2020, the concentration of particulate matter was influenced by local weather conditions.