Macquarie’s University academic policy
Macquarie’s University academic policy is founded on values of honesty, trust, integrity, and ethics. Thus, we are encouraged to conduct all academic affairs with integrity. Academic integrity is thus critical for me in my coursework. Frist, academic integrity ensures that scholars are constantly able to add to the body of human knowledge. Without which, unauthorised collaboration, copying, cheating, and plagiarism will limit the ability to perform ethical research that is of value to our society. According to Cavico and Mujtaba (2009), the proliferation and easy availability of technologies have increased integrity issues in modern universities. This explains why our institution uses hearings, suspensions, grade penalties and other forms of punishments to modify behaviour and prevent students from cheating in their coursework. This way, I learn that academic integrity has contributed to my development of positive and careful thinking that contributes positively to my social world. Particularly, I appreciate learning on academic integrity and its importance in academic excellence. As such, I plan to integrate academic integrity in my behaviour. Importantly, learning academic integrity is important as it helps me to avoid some forms of unintentional dishonesty that may happen in many forms like poor citation in plagiarism (McGrail and McGrail, 2015). Therefore, they will help me to perform authentic research. Besides, dishonesty in academic would only give me an unfair advantage especially when I copy or cheat in a given assignment. I am confident that when the rest of the students and I faithfully follow guidelines provided for academic integrity, genuine academic excellence will be achieved. This then requires that I should always be prepared and committed to scholarly excellence characterised by the values of academic integrity.
References
Cavico, F.J. and Mujtaba, B.G., 2009. Making the Case for the Creation of an Academic Honesty and Integrity Culture in Higher Education: Reflections and Suggestions for Reducing the Rise in Student Cheating. American Journal of Business Education, 2(5), pp.75-88.
McGrail, E. and McGrail, J.P., 2015. Exploring web-based university policy statements on plagiarism by research-intensive higher education institutions. Journal of Academic Ethics, 13(2), pp.167-196.
