While academic dishonesty is not a new phenomenon, an education expert says that since the pandemic, the increased submission of tests and assignments online has provided additional loopholes for some students to submit work not wholly their own.
Dr Gillian Mooney at The Independent Institute of Education explains that academic dishonesty at university includes cheating, plagiarism, and referencing issues – and she cautions that one of the consequences for students engaging in unethical behaviour is that they jeopardise the credibility of their qualification and institution in the eyes of future employers.
Dr Mooney says there are three types of academic dishonesty:
- Cheating: Collaborating on assignments with others when you were tasked to do the work on your own, copying work or ideas from other students, helping someone cheat by sharing your work with them, downloading questions or assignments from the internet.
- Plagiarism: Paraphrasing, that is using key points from different sources and rewriting them as if they are your own, copying and pasting pieces of different text to create a new text, rewording or changing some words in sourced material, obscure sourcing to hide the actual source material, and weak citation, and therefore not properly acknowledging that this work was sourced from elsewhere.
- Referencing: Proper referencing is very important and requires students to consistently use the same referencing format, adhere to technical correctness and follow academic conventions, and ensure references in the text match up with the bibliography/reference list.
Any institution, whether public university or private higher education institution, has a duty towards their students to protect the credibility of their qualifications and the reputation of the institution, which is why it is of the utmost importance that institutions serious about this duty have clear policies and consequences – vigilantly enforced – regarding academic integrity.
All students want future employers to consider their qualification in a serious light, which means they will be acting in their own self-interest by protecting the credibility of their qualification and their institution by not resorting to plagiarism.