When you think about academic impropriety or misconduct, you probably imagine the obvious examples — having a friend complete your assignment, buying a paper from an essay mill, or simply prompting ChatGPT to do the work for you. But what’s considered “cheating” in an academic setting isn’t always that conspicuous.
This week is National Academic Integrity Week, and institutions around the country, including us here at the DBS library, are hosting programs to help you be a more honest and responsible student to ensure you get the most out of your education.
To mark this occasion, we’ve compiled a list of five things that you may not have realized constitute academic impropriety. Read through to make sure you’re not falling into any of these traps.
1. Asking AI to reword a sentence or restructure a paragraph
You’re likely aware that using a generative artificial intelligence program to write your entire assignment from scratch is not permitted by the school, but there are more minor uses of AI that still constitute academic impropriety. Asking an AI tool to reword or restructure your work is one of these. You are allowed to use AI programs to proofread your assignments, but you should never be copying and pasting the output of one of these tools into your papers. At that point, the assignment is no longer your own original work.
Further detail on what is and is not allowed regarding the use of AI for schoolwork is available here.
2. Writing your paper based on your friend’s notes
Although it’s common to share notes with a classmate who may have missed a lecture, it’s always best to defer to your lecturer’s slides or your own notes when completing an assignment. If you pull a sentence from a friend’s notes and they use the same phrasing in their own paper, you both may be found to have committed academic impropriety.
This is considered collusion, an offence where students work together on an assignment that is meant to be completed independently. Collusion can also include having a friend rewrite sections of an assignment for you or help you with an at-home exam.
3. Forgetting to include a reference
Picture this: You’ve completed your paper, feeling good, and just waiting to hear back from your lecturer, who you expect will have nothing but praise. Instead, your lecturer wants to talk to you about a section of your paper that they don’t think is original work. You did pull a lot of that section from a specific article, but, no worries, you cited everything, you just need to point it out in your reference list. Only, the reference isn’t there. You forgot to include it.
Now, because you haven’t given credit to the authors and researchers you pulled from, your work is considered plagiarism. The best way to avoid this fate is by adding to your reference list while you’re writing rather than leaving it until the end of your assignment. Tools such as Zotero, which the library has a guide for here, can make that process easier. Don’t let anything slip through the cracks!
4. Having AI generate your reference list
Generative AI programs are not reliable enough to compile your references for you as they are prone to hallucinations where they produce fabricated, often nonsensical outputs. In other words, they make things up. Additionally, even if the citations produced by the program are all real and accurate, it may miss something you’ve referenced in your work, leading to potential plagiarism accusations.
A reference list generated by artificial intelligence would need to be thoroughly vetted in order to make sure it’s entirely accurate. And at that point, it is probably easier to just use one of the referencing tools mentioned above.
5. Re-using your own work
If you have similar assignments in your current classes to work you’ve completed in the past, it may be tempting to simply re-use old papers. However, if you’re pulling from work without significant rephrasing or editing, this is a form of academic impropriety known as self-plagiarism. Instead of recycling, it’s better to go back to your previous work as a source of inspiration but produce something original for the new assignment.
You are allowed to cite yourself when completing an assignment if you have previously conducted research relevant to the work you’re doing now. Instructions on properly structuring your references are available here.
Remember, academic integrity isn’t just about pleasing your lecturers, it’s about ensuring that you leave each course with as much high-quality knowledge as possible. Don’t cheat yourself out of a good education by trying to take a shortcut, especially not one that might land you in front of the Academic Impropriety Committee.