Daniele's Blog

Academic integrity is a vital constituent of educational process, and it entails honesty, responsibility, and fairness. To ensure it, students must avoid a number of violations, such as cheating, plagiarism, fabrication of data, presenting false credential, collusion, and free riding.
One of the most serious violations is plagiarism, which is the use of work, words, speech or ideas of other people, and passing them off as oneâ??s own. It also means the use of direct or indirect quotes without appropriate referencing. To avoid plagiarism, students must produce original work, and properly cite original sources.
One more violation is cheating which means an unauthorised use of any supplementary materials, receiving assistance from forbidden sources, and copying work from fellow students. An example of it is an illicit use of notes or asking group mates for correct answers during examination or test. In order to avoid this violation, students must rely exclusively on their own knowledge and erudition, without resorting to external assistance.
Another infringement is fabrication of data, which involves inventing facts or presenting false information as true in order to support arguments stated in the work. For example, students may falsify results of experiments for their natural sciences class, or make up sources they did not use for bibliography. Students must provide genuine information to stay away from this violation.
Presenting false or misleading credential also involves forgery, but in this case, it concerns documents, for example, fake ID cards, papers claiming degrees that were not actually earned, medical certificates as an excuse for missing classes. Students are strictly forbidden to commit this violation and are demanded to provide only genuine and valid documents.
Collusion is an agreement between students to cooperate when they are supposed to do an assignment on their own, for example, copying from, or doing work together with another student, but passing it off as an independent, own project. To stay away from this violation, pupils must work on their tasks individually.
Free riding is a violation in some way opposite to the previous one. Free riders are students who fail to contribute to teamwork, for example, when a group is doing a common project, and some persons do not accomplish their share of work. Thus, all students are bound to participate actively in group tasks.
Academic integrity is an essential condition for fair and effective studying, so any breach of the school policy is inadmissible. That is why students are obliged to do their best to stay away from each of these violations if they aim at acquiring profound knowledge, avoiding penalties, and successful graduation.