Discussion on the Values of Academic Integrity

Question

Task

Write a report in two parts describing and discussing Academic Integrity. This should include:-

Section 1

An Introduction including a description of Academic Integrity

A discussion of the importance of academic integrity in higher education

Discuss the implications of academic misconduct

Section 2

Reflect on the steps you have taken, and difficulties encountered in producing the game for Assignment 2.

Reflect on the skills you have learned this academic year and those emphasized in producing your game.

Write in a grammatically correct style and provide in text referencing throughout, including quotes, referenced according to the Harvard Referencing System.

Answer

Introduction
Academic integrity includes the values or moral codes that are utilized during any educational activity that is mostly conducted by the Universities. The values or the moral codes work as proper guidance that supports the academic as well as learning methods in institutions. As a result of the gradual advancement of the educational system, these days academic activities such as research, project works, group studies, etc. have become more complex than ever. Hence the academic integrity and development of more academic skills can be helpful for many university students as well as any student belonging from any level of the educational system (Ramdani., 2018). Here in this report, the values of academic integrity will be discussed, also there will be a discussion about its significance or how it is important for those students to belong to the higher educational level. This report will also have conclusions regarding the misconduct of academic activities. Readers of this report might expect a deep understanding of the concepts of academic integrity and the suggestion that can be followed for the promotion of this noble cause.

Section 1

An Introduction including a description of Academic Integrity
Academic integrity is the values, moral codes, norms, or behaviors upon which the solid foundation of the academic or educational activities is based. This academic integrity requires a lot of effort and practice of the values such as being fair, being responsible, showing respect, building trust, being honest which will support the learning or academic activity of any individual. Being fair for any student is necessary for the academic field as it will determine the quality of their work which is done by not taking advantage, by not exploiting other peoples (McKenzie., 2018). Budling trust among students as well as other people is essential as it will help to build bonds and relations which are valuable for conducting any academic activity and that is the way someone’s work can be validated. Respect is a virtue and being respectful also depends on the respect shown by any individual and the academic field demands this quality from every student. Showing respect to the staff, other students, guide, teacher, respondents of any research work, etc. is essential for promoting academic integrity. One of the important values of academic integrity is to be responsible towards the work as well as being in charge of choosing the learning methods and choosing the efficient way of making a deep understanding of any study. Finally, being honest is also a virtue that is required for promoting the structural integrity of academic practices. Being honest will help any student to be clear about the originality of the unique and creative ideas also it will help to be clear about the effective methods that can be used for squeezing the results out from those ideas (Amigud and Pell., 2020). However, it is also necessary for the institutions such as high schools, colleges, especially universities to reward those students, staff, research fellows, developers, etc to promote the structural soundness also the effectiveness of the academic activates. People involved in this line of work should show respect toward their respective institution and ensure the promotion of academic integrity by:

• Proper utilization of appropriate information by maintaining the rules, regulations, data protection policies, policies regarding copyrights, laws of privacy, etc.
• Avoiding or preventing theft and mis publication of other’s works as own work.
• Constructing reports and publishing those that are mainly based on the research, data collection, and analysis conducted by individual research fellows via maintaining honesty and truthfulness.
• Carefully maintaining ethical considerations during any project or research works.
• Making proper acknowledgment and referencing according to the various origins of the data and information that are going to be used in any project or research work.
• Avoiding publication of any misleading information or compromising the previous original data quality.

A discussion of the importance of academic integrity in higher education
Academic integrity is crucial or significant for the educational activities mostly conducted at a higher level of education. As a matter of the fact in these days research works, project ideas, published papers, reports, and records are gradually losing their uniqueness. There are a lot of suspicious activities, thefts are seen in various levels of the education system as in graduation, post-graduation, Ph.D., etc. Hence for preventing this suspicion in universities academic integrity should be promoted and moral codes, values of this should be applied among aspirants. Academic integrity will prevent suspicious activities as well as criminal activities of theft and promote the development of unique ideas among aspirants. It will promote the usage of individual thought processes and advance learning methods (Brown and Janssen., 2017). Academic integrity helps in increasing the power of the university authority, the quality of teaching, and spreading the education as it prevents the rate of plagiarism and direct allowance of any university to attempt cheating. The values and moral codes of academic integrity can keep any individual belonging to any level of the university from indulging in corruption. The moral codes spread awareness of data safety policies, policies regarding theft management, policies resistant to plagiarism, etc (Brown et al., 2019). Awareness of these policies may help the aspirants to be careful about their academic activities. Involvement of law and constitution is also expected in the educational system application strict rules and regulations can prevent a significant rate of criminal offense in this field.

Discuss the implications of academic misconduct
Consciences of academic misconducting can be fatal as It will directly influence many of the criminal as well as suspicious activities that can ruin any educational environment of any institution (Eaton et al., 2020). Academic misconduct can raise the rate of cheating, scamming, etc. Students, as well as researchers, might indulge in stealing data from other’s work and publish that as their work. Researchers might indulge in plagiarism, some of them may indulge these activities intentionally some of them may get involved in this by not knowing this as lack of awareness. Failure of academic integrity may increase the rate of unacceptable collaborations among various researchers or students that can lessen the effectiveness of the academic activities of concern (Tran et al, 2018). Mis presentation of data, false publication of records, and official documents can take place. Other than that dishonesty, lack of truthfulness, disturbance in the educational environment, interference of unauthorized persons, etc. may happen.

Section 2

Reflect on the steps you have taken, and difficulties encountered in producing the game for Assignment 2
There is a game that has been introduced called “Fame your ideas” and the game aims to serve the willing students, researchers, aspirants, etc. the in-depth information about the academic is conductions and prevention techniques of plagiarism. In this game for the prevention of academic misconduct and plagiarism paraphrasing is been chosen and one of the main objectives of the game is to implement those paraphrasing techniques. This game simply requires the involvement of 5 participants as one of them will be the professional and the rest four must be the students. Implementation of the paraphrasing techniques will be interactive as it will test the comprehension skills of the participant students also will test the teaching abilities or skills of the participant professor.

In the first level of the game, the professor must introduce some sentences to the student as they will be asked to reframe those sentences as their own. Then some of the students may fail in the initial level but those failed students will be provided with proper knowledge of paraphrasing and how that is done. All students will be given the effective techniques of paraphrasing by the end of the first phase of the game by the participant professor. Finally in the second stage students will be given multiple choice questions for putting their comprehension power to the test. During the production of the game, there were a lot of difficulties that were faced such as lack of creative ideas of implementing the paraphrasing techniques which almost sabotaged the development of the game, lack of knowledge about plagiarism and paraphrasing, lack of linguistic knowledge, etc. The game has been conducted so many times in the university-level students with their respective professors. There are so many steps in course of conduction this game such as choosing many previously established research papers that can be used as the source of sentences, accumulation of sufficient amount of data, collecting the consent of the participants from the students as well as the teachers, consent of the university regarding the allocation of the venue for organizing the game, management of the game dynamics as some people were set to rectify the issues regarding the progression of the game, etc. There were a lot of challenging situations that have been faced in conduction the game and the challenges or difficulties are such as many of the students as well as many of the professors didn’t participate as they did not give any consent due to their packed schedules. Many students who volunteered were not unable to understand even the mechanism of the game. In many cases, all the participant students failed to reframe sentences in the initial phase which resulted in an error in the game dynamic. One of the frequent difficulties was with participant students with a lack of comprehension skills. In some of the cases sufficient data was not collected for organizing the game, many of the copyright holders didn’t care to permit for fair use of their contents, research papers, project reports, etc. Sometimes universities didn’t agree to permit usage of their venues for organizing the game.

Reflect on the skills you have learned this academic year and those emphasized in producing your game
During the production of this game, many things were becoming clear and it had nourished so many aspects of a student's life. The things or topics are such as plagiarism, paraphrasing, academic misconducting, academic integrity, necessary linguistic knowledge, team management, etc. Based on the topic many skills were also got nourished such as honesty, writing, paraphrasing techniques, research works, understanding or comprehension, innovation, and creativity, etc.

• During the production of the game, honesty has been increased as one of the main objectives of the game was to prevent plagiarism and dishonesty cannot be expected here. Being honest about the data publication, and presentation of the report should be mandated by all the universities.
• The development of the game has significantly brought some positive impacts on the writing skills as it increased vocabulary and sentence reframing techniques.
• Production of the game has cleared all the concepts about how an ideal research work should be done, so this can be said that competency in research work conduction has been improved.
• The development of the game has raised the potential of creative and innovative thinking and this game also pushed the developers towards proper implementation of those ideas in actions.
• The paraphrasing skills have been improved as this game itself promotes the activity and spreads awareness about plagiarism and how paraphrasing can be utilized as a solution to it.
• The production of this game has raised the comprehension skills of the developer team.

Conclusion
Academic misconduct is a serious offense to commit and this can ruin the institutional environment of any university (Stoesz and Los., 2019). Hence academic integrity the values and codes are essential and should be made mandatory by the educational systems of any county. Plagiarism is also a big concern but paraphrasing can be utilized as the solution to plagiarism. Other than that, many other academic misconducts should be prevented by increasing creative and innovative thinking, by spreading awareness about the laws, rules, and regulations imposed by the constitution (Sheard et al., 2017). Academic integrity should be raised for increasing the quality of the education

References
Amigud, A. and Pell, D.J., 2020. When academic integrity rules should not apply: a survey of academic staff. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, pp.1-15. Brown, N. and Janssen, R., 2017. Preventing plagiarism and fostering academic integrity: A practical approach. Journal of Perspectives in Applied Academic Practice, 5(3), pp.102-109.

Brown, T., Bourke-Taylor, H., Isbel, S., Gustafsson, L., McKinstry, C., Logan, A. and Etherington, J., 2019. Establishing similarities and differences among the self-reported academic integrity of Australian occupational therapy undergraduate and graduate-entry Master’s students. The Open Journal of Occupational Therapy, 7(3), pp.1-16.

Eaton, S.E., Stoesz, B.M., Thacker, E.J. and Miron, J.B., 2020. Methodological decisions in undertaking academic integrity policy analysis: Considerations for future research. Canadian Perspectives on Academic Integrity, 3(1), pp.83-91.

McKenzie, A.M., 2018. Academic integrity across the Canadian landscape. Canadian Perspectives on Academic Integrity, 1(2), pp.40-45. Ramdani, Z., 2018. Construction of academic integrity scale. International Journal of Research Studies in Psychology, 7(1), pp.87-97.

Sheard, J., Butler, M., Falkner, K., Morgan, M. and Weerasinghe, A., 2017, June. Strategies for maintaining academic integrity in first-year computing courses. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (pp. 244-249).

Stoesz, B.M. and Los, R., 2019. Evaluation of a tutorial designed to promote academic integrity. Canadian Perspectives on Academic Integrity, 2(1), pp.3-26.

Sutherland-Smith, W., 2008. Plagiarism, the Internet, and student learning: Improving academic integrity. Routledge.

Tran, U.T., Huynh, T. and Nguyen, H.T.T., 2018. Academic integrity in higher education: The case of plagiarism of graduation reports by undergraduate seniors in Vietnam. Journal of Academic Ethics, 16(1), pp.61-69.