Academic Integrity

What is Academic Integrity?

Academic integrity is the commitment to act ethically, with honesty, respect and fairness in creating and communicating information in an academic environment. This applies to both staff and students. In short, it means to produce original work and use other people’s academic work with honesty and acknowledgement.

The opposite of this is academic misconduct. This is to act with dishonesty. Academic misconduct includes using another person’s work without acknowledging the source (plagiarism), creating false data, or cheating on an exam. Academic misconduct carries serious penalties at JCU, including exclusion from the University.

Academic misconduct may also include any of these:

• Failure to reference work
• Paying another person to complete your work
• Submitting work that was not done by you
• Working with another person but claiming it is your work
• Cheating on an exam in any way
• Offering a bribe
• Falsifying research results
• Self-plagiarism (autoplagiarism)

Also in this module

• Why does Academic Integrity matter?
• What does Academic Integrity look like?
• Acknowledging sources of information
• What is Plagiarism?
• What does Plagiarism look like?
• How to avoid Plagiarism
• Self-Plagiarism
• Take the Plagiarism Quiz