Academic integrity

Academic integrity means demonstrating honest, moral behaviours when producing academic work. This involves acknowledging the work of others, giving appropriate credit to others where their ideas are presented as part of your work and the importance of producing work in your own voice. Contributions by artificial intelligence (AI) tools must be properly acknowledged. As part of a learning community, students share ideas and develop new ones – you need to be able to interpret and present other people's ideas and combine these with your own when producing work. To achieve this, you will be supported to develop skills of reflection and self-awareness about topics such as fairness, responsibility and respect in academic practice.

Academic integrity includes a variety of elements including:

honesty - being truthful about which ideas are our own and which are derived from others and about the methodologies and results of our work.
trust - the ability to rely on the truth of someone or something is a fundamental pillar of academic pursuit and a necessary foundation of academic work.
fairness - not trying to gain an advantage by unfair means for instance by passing off the work of others as your own.
responsibility - taking an active role in our own learning.
respect - for the work of fellow students, teachers and other writers and scholars.
courage - being courageous means acting in accordance with one's convictions. Students who exhibit courage hold themselves and their fellow learners to the highest standards of academic integrity even when doing so involves risk of negative consequences, such as a bad grade, or reprisal from their peers or others.

Plagiarism (including copying, self-plagiarism and collusion)

Plagiarism is the act of presenting the work of another person (or people) and/or content generated by artificial intelligence (AI) tools as your own without proper acknowledgement. This includes copying the work of another student or other students.

The University expects students to take responsibility for the security of their work (i.e. with written work, to ensure that other students do not get access to electronic or hard copy of the work). Failure to keep work secure may allow others to cheat, and could result in an allegation of academic misconduct for students whose work have been copied, particularly if the origin of the work is in doubt.

Self-plagiarism

The act of presenting part or all of your work that has been previously submitted to meet the requirements of a different assessment, except where the nature of the assessment makes this permissible.

Collusion

The act, by two or more students, of presenting a piece of work jointly without acknowledging the collaboration. This could include permitting or assisting another to present work that has been copied or paraphrased from your own work.

The University also defines collusion as the act of one student presenting a piece of work as their own independent work when the work was undertaken by a group. With group work, where individual members submit parts of the total assignment, each member of a group must take responsibility for checking the legitimacy of the work submitted in his/her name. If even part of the work is found to contain academic misconduct, penalties will normally be imposed on all group members equally.

Unacceptable use of generative artificial intelligence

The University defines the unacceptable use of Generative Artificial Intelligence as the act of presenting content generated by artificial intelligence tools (such as text, media, tables etc – list not exhaustive), as one’s own without proper acknowledgement, except where the nature of the assessment makes this permissible and is explicitly stated in the assessment brief. The University will typically consider this academic misconduct as a type of plagiarism.

Cheating in an examination venue

The University defines cheating in an examination venue as including:

Taking notes or any unauthorised materials into an examination venue. This includes having notes available in toilets or other areas that may be visited during the examination. If students refuse to comply with instructions if they request to leave the examination venue during the examination (e.g. a toilet visit), this may be considered evidence of attempted academic misconduct.
Obtaining an advanced copy of a question paper.
Unauthorised communication during an examination (including via telephone or other electronic media).
Removing an examination answer book from the examination venue.
Copying from another candidate.
Allowing oneself to be impersonated.
Impersonating another candidate.

Fabricating or falsifying data or using without permission another person's work

The act of fabricating or falsifying data to include presenting work that has not taken place. This includes laboratory reports or projects based on experimental or field work. It may also include falsifying attendance sheets for placements where this is part of the assessment requirements.

Purchasing or commissioning

The act of attempting to purchase or purchasing work for an assessment including, for example from the internet, or attempting to commission, or commissioning someone else to complete an assessment on your behalf.

Academic integrity