Review of Academic Honesty: Principles and Practice

Nagabhushanam Chintha^* and S Nagaraju ^*Correspondence: Nagabhushanam Chintha, Department of Library and Information Science, Osmania University, Hyderabad, India, Email:

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Introduction

The Academic honesty module of arts smart provides examples of different kinds of plagiarism, inviting students to practise their skills in avoiding the traps. It also attempts to explain the way in which academic knowledge is built upon the synthesis and responsible use of shared knowledge, works and ideas, pointing out that plagiarism is inimical to scholarly communication. Significantly it also addresses the emotional and affective domain by enquiring about the values and ideas students have in response to complex ethical dilemmas associated with plagiarism, collusion, cheating, in an information-overloaded environment. Students have opportunities to interact with one another, exploring these issues. We are not addressing here or in the online tutorial the complex and ever changing relationship between knowledge and ownership of ideas and the marketplace. Rather we accepted the imperative to ensure that students are aware of plagiarism and the importance of academic honesty. We aimed to support learners in their learning tasks how could they demonstrate the ways in which they selected information, built arguments and presented new and existing information? A further module is devoted to an examination of copyright from a student perspective. This module is designed to give students a basic understanding of their rights and obligations in this complex area. It is another area that broadly deals with the ethical use of information.

The existence of academic misconduct in universities, particularly in the form of plagiarism and cheating, is widely acknowledged and its incidence is evident in a series of major studies conducted in universities in the United States and the United Kingdom. For example, in Web surveys involving 40,000 undergraduate students on 68 campuses across the United States and Canada, 21% of respondents acknowledged at least 1 incident of serious test or examination cheating, and 51% acknowledged at least 1 incident of serious cheating on written work. There is also evidence that modes of academic misconduct have changed in recent years. The growth of Web-based information, paper mills, cheat sites and easily reformatted text has blurred the boundaries of intellectual property.

Academic honesty is a commitment to honesty, trust, fairness, respect and responsibility in conducting academic work. Academic students are expected to be honestly in their academic work and to be honest in report findings. Academic honesty is a code of conduct in academic community (Ajzen, 1991). Academic honesty is a commitment to honesty, trust, fairness, respect and responsibility in conducting of academic work.

Academic dishonesty means not practicing academic honesty. Academic dishonesty deals with the attempted or unauthorized use of materials, information, notes, study aids, devices or communication during an academic exercise. Plagiarism is the act of presenting another person's ideas, research or writing as own. Academic dishonesty deals the unfair advantage, circulating, reproducing and stealing or gaining unauthorized access to confidential text (Alschuler and Gregory, 1995).

Now a days in internet era internet plagiarism is most common in colleges and universities. In India, Dravdian university, Kuppam, a state university of Andhra Pradesh rejected 427 research theses and dissertations in all subjects during 2008-2016, because of plagiarism is more than 30%.

Literature Review

Why students/scholars should practice academic honesty?

•It helps them establish and maintain trust with instructors.
•Students who cheat or plagiarize risk negative consequences, such as grade deductions,suspension or expulsion from a school.
•Academic honesty ensures that a student gets credit for his own work and receivesconstructive feedback on his own work.
•Self confidence and self respect.
•It helps to shape personalities.
•Provide credit to those who worked for it not to those who cheat.
•Will make truthful and reliable in life time.
•It teaches to become responsible.
•Help them to keep pursuing their educational goals with dignity, integrity and admirationfor school campus (Brown and Dennis, 2001).

How examiners view academic honesty:

•Quality of sources used.
•Formatting styles.
•Examining online sources.
•Searching suspicious sections of papers (using free search engines such as Google.
•Using plagiarism detector (e.g., Turnitin, Plagiarism.org, Safeassign etc.
• Citing and referencing.

How to practice academic honesty in academic works:

• By using own work.
• By citing and referencing.
• Giving proper acknowledgement.
• By preventing plagiarism.

Meaning of proper acknowledgment: To use others work in the assignment, there is a need to use citation and referencing. When we restate others ideas and opinions, need to include an in text citation and an entry in the bibliography or reference list (Bunn, Steven and Daniel, 1992). If we use others words exactly, then we need to include quotation marks (" ") and an entry in the bibliography or reference list.

Citing and referencing

To give credit to original author and to acknowledge the others work, there is a need to use citation and referencing (Diekhoff, Emily, Robert and Larry, 1996). Citing and referencing deals with the original work. It gives credit to original author. Citation can be defined in text citation and foot note or bibliographical referencing list. There are some standard styles deals citation and reference. MLA, Harvard, IEEE, APA, Chicago etc (Haines, George, Emily and Robert, 1986).

Why:

• To give credit to another author ideas and theory.
• Understand the concepts and know who has written about them.
• To allow reader to find and examine the sources.
• Information to verify source.
• To access in depth information.

What not to cite:

• Common knowledge facts.
• Statistical information widely available in all sources that are not vary from source to source.
• Commonly known encyclopedia and dictionary definitions.
• Common knowledge facts not have to be cited.
• Easily available statistical information and can be found in several sources.
• Encyclopedia, wikipedia and dictionary words and definitions of common known (Houston, 1986).

When:

• Restate an ideas and thesis of an author.
• Expressing others theory and opinion.
• Common knowledge facts, for information and explanatory notes.
• We also must cite for restatements of authors summary and paraphrase.
• Using author’s words exactly,
• Using single key word/scientific terminology that are not common knowledge (Houston, 1983).

Citing and referencing styles: There are so many citation and referencing styles are available. Some of the common used are:

• APA (American Psychological Association): Psychology, sociology, business, nursing, social work, criminology.
• MLA (Modern Language Association): English, languages, speech, communication
• Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS):
• Turabian: It uses 2 methods of documentation:
• A note bibliography system.
• A parenthetical author date system.
• CSE (Council of Science Editors)
• The Citation Sequence system (CS).
• The Name Year system (NY).
• IEEE: Commonly used in engineering
• Harvard: Commonly used in social sciences (Houston, 1976).

Citing and referencing resources (As per APA style)

Books and documents: Author is full name (first name, then the family name) and that the title is written in italics; some university departments will underline the title instead of putting it in italics (Karlins, Charles and Susan, 1988). After the title, we must indicate the city where the book was published, name of the editor, publication year and finally, the page number(s). When the reference is about a page in particular, shall include "p." but if it regards several pages, we shall indicate "pp." (Sheri, Renuka, Jennifer and Stephen, 2000). Hoang, Paul (2011). Business Management for IB. London, UK: Cambridge University press.

Article and paper: It includes the author(s) of the article, title of the article, the name of the periodical, periodical publication year, volume and issue number, article page numbers and full text article URL (Kerkvliet, 1994).

Plagiarism

Plagiarism means failing to acknowledge the sources of others work in our creative works whether intentionally or unintentionally (Kerkvliet and Charles, 1999). Plagiarism is considered academic dishonesty and can constitute copyright infringement. Plagiarism can be defined as failing to acknowledge the source of original author intentionally or unintentionally. Copying and pasting text, without citation and referencing and theory or ideas of others without giving proper acknowledgment. Digital technology has made easy to detect of plagiarism

Types of plagiarism:

• Self plagiarism: Submitting the personal work more than once to other purpose done by same without proper permission from the teachers involved.
• Collusion: Helping others to submit your work as their own work.

Preventing plagiarism

• Proper citing and referencing.
• Study concepts and ideas of different authors work and compare.
• Write in own words, do not copy and paste.
• Try to add different words instead of using regular words.
• Use plagiarism detecting tools.
• Do not copy and paste text.

Academic honesty and IPR

Academic honesty is also applicable to IPR. Intellectual Property (or IP) refers to creative work which can be treated as an asset or physical property. Intellectual property rights fall principally into four main areas; copyright, trademarks, industrial design, geographical indications and patents. According to WIPO Intellectual Property (IP) refers to “creations of the mind, such as inventions; literary and artistic works; designs; and symbols, names and images used in commerce”. “Intellectual Property (IP) protects by law which enable people to earn recognition or financial benefit from what they invent or create”. For example are trademarks, copyright, trademarks, patents, trades secrets and industrial design rights.

Conclusion

The present scenario of availability of internet resources increased academic dishonesty in student community. There is a strong need to implement academic honesty policies in academic institutions. Many students as well as teachers they do not know the concept of academic honesty so they need training. The libraries should play an important role in this area to help students and teachers in citation and referencing. The new concept of internet citing should be trained in academic institutions. Academic dishonesty can be prevented by proper citing and referencing.

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