Academic dishonesty in higher education is not a new phenomenon.
There are many reasons why students are not academically honest. For instance, some students resort to dishonesty because their language skills are lacking, while poor work ethic urges others to find illegitimate solutions to submitting assignments.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, which brought with it an increased need to submit tests and assignments online, additional loopholes have acted as an incentive for some students to submit plagiarised work, an academic expert says.
According to Dr Gillian Mooney, dean of academic support and development at the Independent Institute of Education, three types of academic dishonesty occur.
Cheating
Various forms of cheating exist. Some examples include collaborating on assignments when you have been tasked to do the work by yourself; copying work or ideas from other students; helping someone cheat by sharing your work with them; downloading questions or assignments from the internet; and paying someone to complete your coursework.
Referencing
Proper referencing requires of students to consistently use the same referencing format, adhere to technical correctness, follow academic conventions and ensure that references in the text match up with the bibliography.
“Proper referencing is very important because students join an academic community and they need to learn the rules of that community,” says Mooney.
“It is worth the effort to focus on getting your referencing on point from the start.”
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is a serious offence. This is the representation of someone else’s work as your own.
Some examples of plagiarism include 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; and rewording or changing some words in sourced material.
Obscure sourcing, which hides the actual source material, and the inclusion of weak citations, which do not properly acknowledge that the work is sourced from elsewhere, are also examples of plagiarism.
Mooney emphasises that plagiarism is not a victimless crime and that the most likely victims will be the plagiarising students themselves.
The consequences might be immediate in terms of sanction by their institution, or delayed as they enter the workplace unprepared.
“Also, the credibility of their qualification could be jeopardised if their institution gains a reputation for being lax in enforcing academic integrity policies.”
Simply put, academic dishonesty is unethical.
All students would like their future employers to consider their qualification in a serious light.
This 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.
“If employers know that a qualification was gained through hard work only, from an institution that demands the highest degree of intellectual integrity from their students, graduates will already have an advantage in the jobs marketplace.”
