Hi friends! How’re you doing? I hope all of you are doing well. The winter has just started here. The temperatures are below ten degrees sometimes. However, I am not writing about the weather today but my study. As a Ph.D. student, I don’t have regular classes here. However, it doesn’t mean I don’t have any class at all besides doing research.
I will share my first class, the “Academic Integrity” Course, in this article. The course gave me insight into the ethical standards and principles as a student at the University of Auckland. Happy reading!
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| Academic Integrity |
What is an Academic Integrity Course?
The Academic Integrity Course is one of the compulsory milestones I must complete within two months after my enrolment. This course will prepare me to be an academician with “integrity” in values, skills, and practices. Besides this course, I must complete DELNA and doctoral induction (I will share it with you in other articles).
The course is an online course. It is similar to those if you are ever enrolled in Coursera, Udemy, or EdX courses. However, my university uses Canvas as the platform. Each module has a brief text, a video and a quiz. I must complete it all and pass each quiz with all correct answers. I could retake the quiz when necessary until reaching a passing grade.
What do I learn?
There are six topics that I learned in this course: the values and importance of academic integrity, referencing, ethical collaboration in group work, insight about third-party assistance, copyright, as well as ethics in research and report data.
Values and Importance of Academic Integrity
The University of Auckland introduces five academic integrity values: tikanga (correct practices), fairness, mōhitonga (different ways of understanding), responsibility, whakamana (empowerment) and whakapapa (connections and lineage). These values are embedded in Te Ao Māori (the Māori worldview), which prioritises the interconnectedness of and respect for all humanity. These values are also fundamental beliefs that will affect the motivation and behaviour of academicians, among others students, teachers, and other staff.
Referencing
Referencing is used to show the quality of our work and make the reader differentiate between our work and others. It also provides a trail of sources that we used. In this module, I learned when I needed to reference and how to do it.
It is crucial to know that every time we use information from other people's works, including quoting, summarising, or paraphrasing (rewording), we must show that this is their work, not ours. However, our experiences or observations (including experimental results), thoughts and conclusions, and common knowledge don’t need to be referenced.
Ethical Collaboration in Group Work
There is some work that we must complete individually and some others that must be completed collaboratively. Through this module, I learned the difference between collaboration and collusion. Indeed, group work can help us to learn better and work effectively. However, it can be transformed into collusion. So, be aware and always try your best to avoid collusion.
Third-party Assistance
Third-party assistance or support means seeking help for assignments from people other than our lecturers or tutors, like fellow students, study groups, friends, family members, learning services, generative artificial intelligence tools, or other professional services. It is allowed to ask for help on clarity, grammar usage, formatting, and referencing.
Is asking for third-party assistance allowed? Or is it considered cheating? It is OK to ask for help but not to complete our work. Otherwise, it will be called contract cheating, which is a form of academic misconduct where our academic work is completed by others, and we acknowledge it as ours.
Copyright
In this module, I learn about examples of copyrighted materials, which means we must not copy and share those materials without permission. It includes print material, computer programmes, dramatic performances, music and arts, and other creative works. It can be textbooks, course materials, images, lecturers, exam questions, or our submitted assignments. However, there are also some materials that are fair dealing or under the public domain.
Ethics in Research and Report Data
In the last module, they gave me information about research ethics, where we need to avoid fabrication or falsification of data in our research since it is an example of academic misconduct. But what if we got a false acquisition of it? This is why we must ensure honesty, accuracy and transparency in our process and report.
Overall, this course taught me the values, skills, and behaviours of academic integrity. However, the most memorable thing is the values the course tries to instil in academicians. Maybe we ever experienced misconduct in academic life, like struggling with whether we should do that or not because many people around us do it. The Academic Integrity Course remind me that even though most people do that, it is not necessarily ethical. We need to understand clearly whether our behaviours reflect the values of academic integrity or the opposite.
If you wanna know more about topics I share briefly in this article, please comment or contact me through Instagram @rianitapuspitari. Thank you for reading, and see you in the next article.
Tuesday 25 June 2024, 23.45
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