The academia and its space are considered to be constructed based on trust, fairness, responsibility, respect, and courage. These ethical values shape the entire culture that surrounds the academic environment. Academic integrity is about placing the values into practice by being honest at work. The work that is needed to be completed in academia is bound to be created ethically. The students are required to demonstrate academic integrity by ensuring that the information they are utilizing is appropriate and doesn’t violate copyright laws.
Along with that, there also comes the need to acknowledge the source of information. There shouldn’t be any shreds of plagiarism in work, and last but not least, conducting research in a way that there shouldn’t be any ambiguity in work. In contrast, dishonest academics stand entirely at the opposite pole. Academic dishonesty is an act where you are not loyal or honest with the academic conduct set by the institute. Students often go for malpractices and try to depict that they hold more knowledge than they do. They get into an activity where the fabrication of information is what they do. In addition, working on things that falsify information is also an everyday habit. Students are bound to work on academic assignments, thesis, coursework, research papers, and more. They try to replicate the ideas of others, and some of them even move ahead by plagiarizing the text completely. Let’s know how both academic integrity and dishonesty stand opposite to each other.
How Does Academic Integrity Help Students in Honing Their Skills?
Academic integrity is generally breached in many dimensions. Working on the methods and bringing them effectively is what students need to do. You need to look at things from a goal-oriented perspective and ensure that things should work correctly, whether it is about framing or semantics. The basics of academic integrity remain the same, but sometimes, things change irreversibly. Even though students need to collaborate while working on assignments to develop essential skills, they still move to individual work capacity, and that’s what the peer-to-peer model is actually about. Below are the things that help students in honing their skills.
- Helps in Building Self-Efficacy
If an institute is trying to work on the student’s academic honesty, then they need to formulate their strategic work so that the students go through a phase of self-achievement. Instead of placing unattainable goals in front of them, it would be a better approach to place goals that can be easily achieved. It will help to build self-efficacy in the students. You need to depict what it is like to get success in a course, and sharing strategies from the previous students is not a bad option at all. You have to make sure that they are excelling in the right way.
- Motivate Them to Avoid Plagiarism
If your students have developed the skills of self-efficacy, then they will never go towards replicating the ideas of others. You need to work so that they never go for an activity where copying the words of others seems to be easy. The academic institutes need to make things easy and motivate the students to conduct vigorous research. The institutes generally use a check over the student’s work, and they run the content through a plagiarism checker. The students must be encouraged that before submitting the work, they should run it through reliable plagiarism software.
- Prepare Students to keep Ethical Considerations Intact
You need to ensure that even after passing their degree, they can maintain integrity in the professional field. Whether they work as an economist, historian, biologist, or psychologist, you need to show them why integrity is essential in the professional domain. Moreover, discussing the case studies in the professional field about work ethics is also essential to develop a habit of maintaining integrity even after graduating.
Consequences of Academic Dishonesty
Academic dishonesty has quite a detrimental effect. Academic dishonesty can land a student in a position where they might have to bear some irreversible consequences. Dishonesty in the academic sphere has become a challenge for everyone. Let’s get a glimpse of the consequences of academic dishonesty.
- Puts Student’s Reputation On Stake
Students’ reputations are put at stake when they are not following the set standards of an institute. Things don’t turn out to be in their favor; they get themselves landed in a situation where everyone sees them with a suspicious eye. If someone is caught duplicating the academic content from another source, they will be viewed as a copycat. Therefore, students need to work on their academic integrity.
- Risk of Being Suspended or Expelled
Almost every institute follows a particular code of conduct, and most of them have a zero-tolerance policy, and they make every individual associated with them follow it. If a student is caught violating any of the code of conduct, they are given a warning and if it still doesn’t work, then suspending or expelling them is the only option left with the institute. Common misconduct is about replicating or plagiarizing the work of others.
Concluding Statement
Maintaining academic integrity is essential for the students, and they need to ensure that things aren’t just followed because they are the rules but taking them as something that can benefit their being and the community. Therefore, academic dishonesty must be avoided in the best possible way.