Academic integrity

Thinking critically about what you read allows you to develop the confidence to draw your own conclusions instead of simply repeating what others have written.

Your responsibility to do your own work and give credit to others for their work applies to whatever is used in the production of assignments, including sources or Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT.

From January 2023, if you use any AI tools for your assessment, you need to state your use in a declaration form in Moodle when you submit your work. This is similar to referencing your sources in your bibliography. The university is using a form for this to help understand how students are using AI in their learning and assessment. In the declaration, you need to specify which tools you have used and how you have used them in your assignment (for example, what you asked the tool to do). You should also check your module guidance or with your Module Leader to see if AI tools can be used for your assessment(s) as there may be some assessments where AI tools cannot be used. 

Submitting other people’s work as your own - it’s really important that the work you do is a result of your own efforts and not something that someone else has done for you. That means that no one should do your work on your behalf (whether paid or unpaid).

Plagiarism - this means presenting or submitting someone else's work (words or ideas), intentionally or unintentionally, as your own. It is important to demonstrate that your work builds upon the range of sources that you have looked at so to avoid plagiarism, you need to develop your referencing skills.

Collusion - this means working with others but submitting the assignment as your own individual work. At Brookes we think it’s really valuable to develop group work skills but unless you have been asked to submit work as a group, it is advisable not to work too closely with others on your assignments.

Duplication - this means submitting work for one module which has been assessed and passed in another. Imagine you are writing an assignment and you remember that you wrote a paragraph on this topic last semester for a different module. You might be tempted to copy and paste it. To avoid duplication, resist that temptation!

Falsification - this means including false data in assignments, e.g. quotations that no one actually said, statistics that are invented, or inventing sources that don’t actually exist.

Use of custom writing services - this means using services that produce work for you. Sometimes, custom writing services have websites that look like study skills sites, but if someone is doing your work for you, whether paid or unpaid, it is never a good idea and it means you are not developing the skills and qualities that your course is intended to give you.

Assisting others to cheat - this would be considered a form of academic misconduct, even if it was an unsuccessful attempt to assist others to cheat.

Unethical practices - this means failing to obtain ethics approval for a research project you are working on. The most common area where this comes up is around projects involving human participation, for which there are departmental, faculty and university procedures that need to be followed. You can explore more about research ethics at Brookes below.