This guide seeks to:
The International Center for Academic Integrity defines academic integrity as commitment to six fundamental values: honesty, trust , fairness, respect, responsibility and courage.
According to the International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI) (2013), the 6 fundamental values that enables academic communities translate ideas into actions are:
Honesty forms the indispensable foundation of integrity and is prerequisite for full realization of trust, fairness, respect, and responsibility.
Honesty begins with individuals and extends out into the larger community. As students and faculty seek knowledge, they must be honest with themselves and with each other. In study halls and laboratories, in libraries, playing fields, and classrooms, cultivating and practicing honesty lays a foundation for lifelong integrity.
Institutions also must commit to being honest with students, faculty, staff, supporters, and their broader communities, for honesty at the organizational level sets the tone for the overall academic endeavor.
Established as a value, honesty allows for and encourages the development of trust. Trust accrues over time, with experience, and is built on a foundation of actions more importantly than words.
Ways to demonstrate honesty:
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. Members of the academic community must be able to trust that work, whether student work or research, is not falsified and that standards are applied equitably to all. Only with trust can we ground new inquiries in the research of others and move forward with confidence. Trust enables students and researchers to collaborate, share information, and circulate new ideas freely, without fear.
Trust is reciprocal: being worthy of others’ trust and allowing oneself to trust others go hand-in-hand.
Students promote trust by preparing work that is honest, thoughtful, and genuine. Faculty promote trust by setting clear guidelines for assignments and for evaluating student work in an equitable, timely, and forthright manner.
Trust is developed by schools that set clear and consistent academic standards, that apply their standards unfailingly and fairly, and that support honest and impartial research.
Outside the academic community, trust enables communities to value and rely on scholarly research, teaching, and degrees. Communities of trust engender cooperation by creating environments in which participants expect to treat others—and be treated—with fairness and respect.
Ways to demonstrate trust:
Impartial treatment is an essential factor in the establishment of ethical communities because it reinforces the importance of truth, ideas, logic, and rationality. Important components of fairness include predictability, transparency, and clear, reasonable expectations.
All members of the academic community, including faculty, students, administration, and staff have a right to expect fair treatment and a duty to treat others fairly.
Faculty members are fair to students, each other, and institutions when they lead by example, communicating expectations clearly, responding to dishonesty consistently, and upholding academic integrity principles unfailingly.
Students engage in fairness by doing their own original work, acknowledging borrowed work appropriately, respecting and upholding academic integrity policies, and by maintaining the good reputation of the institution.
Administrators and staff are fair to their communities when they provide clear, useful, and just policies that help establish and nurture communities of integrity, and that treat students, faculty, staff, alumni, and institutions with respect. Impartial, consistent, and just responses to dishonesty and integrity breaches are fundamental to educational fairness. Accurate and impartial evaluation also plays an important role in educational processes by establishing trust among faculty and students.
Ways to demonstrate fairness:
Respect in academic communities is reciprocal and requires showing respect for oneself as well as others. Respect for self means tackling challenges without compromising your own values. Respect for others means valuing the diversity of opinions and appreciating the need to challenge, test, and refine ideas.
Scholarly communities succeed when there is respect for community members and for the diverse and sometimes contradictory opinions expressed. The most dynamic and productive learning environments foster active engagement, including rigorous testing, spirited debate, and lively disagreements over ideas tempered by civility and courtesy to those who voice them.
Students show respect when they value and take advantage of opportunities to gain new knowledge by taking an active role in their own education, contributing to discussions, actively listening to other points of view, and performing to the best of their ability.
Faculty show respect by taking students’ ideas seriously, by recognizing them as individuals, helping them develop their ideas, providing full and honest feedback on their work, and valuing their perspectives and their goals.
Members of academic communities further show respect by acknowledging intellectual contributions of other scholars through proper identification and citation of sources. Cultivating environments in which all members show and enjoy respect is both an individual and a collective responsibility.
Ways to demonstrate respect:
Upholding the values of integrity is simultaneously an individual duty and a shared concern. Every member of an academic community—each student, staff, faculty member, and administrator—is accountable to themselves and each other for safeguarding the integrity of its scholarship, teaching, research, and service.
Shared responsibility distributes and magnifies the power to effect change. Responsible communities can overcome apathy and inspire others to uphold the academic integrity standards of the group.
Being responsible means standing up against wrongdoing, resisting negative peer pressure, and serving as a positive example. Responsible individuals hold themselves accountable for their own actions and work to discourage and prevent misconduct by others.
Responsible faculty not only create and enforce classroom and institutional policy, but they also clearly communicate expectations around these policies. They keep their word and adhere to their own and their institution’s policies.
Likewise, responsible students seek to obtain and understand information about classroom and institutional policy. They follow these policies and ask questions when they do not understand or disagree with them.
Responsible institutions and administrators work to ensure that the educational process, the institution’s policies, and even its funding sources and extracurricular activities align with the institution’s mission and long-range vision.
Ways to demonstrate responsibility:
Courage differs from the preceding fundamental values by being more a quality or capacity of character. However, as with each of the values, courage can be practiced and developed.
Courage often is interpreted as a lack of fear. In reality, courage is the capacity to act in accordance with one’s values despite fear. Being courageous means acting in accordance with one’s convictions. Like intellectual capacity, courage can only develop in environments where it is tested. Academic communities of integrity, therefore, necessarily include opportunities to make choices, learn from them, and grow. Through this iterative process, courage and the five additional values of academic integrity can develop as interwoven and mutually dependent characteristics.
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.
Among faculty members, courage manifests itself as the willingness to hold themselves, students, and other faculty accountable for maintaining a culture of integrity as defined by the five additional values. Courageous faculty also hold institutions and administrators accountable for aligning policy with mission and vision and for supporting an environment that fosters integrity. The same is true for administrators.
Members of academic communities must learn to make decisions that demonstrate integrity. They also must then display the courage necessary to act on those decisions. Only by exercising courage is it possible to create communities that are responsible, respectful, trustworthy, fair, and honest and strong enough to endure regardless of the circumstances they face.
Ways to demonstrate courage:
Academic Dishonesty is committing or participating in any act that goes against the values of academic Integrity while engaging in academic related activities. It applies not only to students, but to everyone in the academic environment (Cizek, 2003; Whitley, Jr. & Keith-Spiegel, 2002).
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is the act of using someone's idea, concept or any original work as your own and you don't give them credit. In educational contexts, there are differing definitions of plagiarism depending on the institution. Also under the scope of plagiarism is self-plagiarism.
Self Plagiarism - Self-plagiarism occurs when a student reuses a work that was published or submitted to another class.
Fabrication
Fabrication is the falsification of data, information, or citations in any formal academic exercise. This includes making up citations to back up arguments or inventing quotations. Fabrication predominates in the natural sciences, where students sometimes falsify data to make experiments "work". It includes data falsification, in which false claims are made about research performed, including selective submitting of results to exclude inconvenient data to generating bogus data.
Deception
Deception is providing false information to a teacher/instructor concerning a formal academic exercise. Examples of this include taking more time on a take-home test than is allowed, giving a dishonest excuse when asking for a deadline extension, or falsely claiming to have submitted work.
Cheating
Cheating can take the form of crib notes, looking over someone's shoulder during an exam, or any forbidden sharing of information between students regarding an exam or exercise.
Bribery
Bribery is an act of giving money or gift giving that alters the behavior of the recipient. It is defined by Black Law's Dictionary as the offering, giving, receiving, or soliciting of any item of value to influence the actions of an official, or other person, in charge of a public or legal duty.
Sabotage
Sabotage involves disrupting or destroying another person's work so that the other person cannot complete an academic activity successfully.
Guiding Students from Cheating and Plagiarism to Honesty and Integrity by The following can be accessed via ProQuest. Contact or CHAT BERTHA for your log-in details.
Pistorius, T., & Mwim, O. S. (2019). The impact of digital copyright law and policy on access to knowledge and learning. Reading & Writing, 10(1) doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/rw.v10i1.196 [Access on ProQuest]
Wherry, T. L., & Dowding, M. R. (2003). The librarian's guide to intellectual property in the digital age: Copyrights, patents, and trademarks. Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science, 27(1), 79-80. Retrieved from https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/librarians-guide-intellectual-property-digital/docview/213901147/se-2?accountid=35994
McLaren, C. (2003, Fall). Copyrights & copywrongs [copyrights and copywrongs: The rise of intellectual property and how it threatens creativity]. Matrix, 16-19. Retrieved from https://www.proquest.com/magazines/copyrights-copywrongs-rise-intellectual-property/docview/233368481/se-2?accountid=35994
Copyright Protection for Philippine Publications by Fe Angela M. Verzosa
Philippine Copyright Laws and eBooks on Pinoy Tech Blog
