Academic integrity

When you come to work at Flinders University you become a member of a community that is committed to principles of academic integrity. This commitment maintains Flinders’ reputation and ensures the quality of our research and graduates.

Integrity is one of the University’s four core values. Academic integrity is a commitment to principles of honesty, respect, trust and fairness. It requires you to be aware of your responsibilities and to adhere to professional and ethical standards in learning, teaching, research and scholarship.

Academic integrity is an integral part of your work as well as the work of students. You are responsible for modelling good practice to your students, educating them in the requirements of academic integrity and the skills to enact it, and for responding to failures to meet requirements when they occur.

A key challenge to academic integrity is contract cheating. The TEQSA Good Practice Note provides helpful guidance for staff to deter, identify and respond to incidents of contract cheating. Flinders policy, procedures and processes are consistent with good practice in the sector .

What is academic integrity?

Academic integrity is a form of ethical behaviour that is particularly important to your role as part of the academic community at Flinders University. It is one aspect of the Flinders University graduate qualities that “value ethical behaviour”. It is crucial to communicate to students the importance of academic integrity. An open dialogue on the subject generates respect for the matter and for staff. If there is a perception that staff do not take academic integrity seriously, then students equally may not take it seriously.

Make sure students know what academic integrity is

Students often fail to meet academic integrity requirements because they don’t understand the importance of creating their own work and acknowledging sources. The Academic Integrity for students webpage provides a comprehensive introduction to academic integrity principles, definitions and practices. Flinders has an excellent academic integrity FLO site for students. It is available to everyone and contains support materials and a quiz for checking their understanding of academic integrity principles, requirements and conventions. Ensure you visit the site to discover what resources are available to students.

Develop student's academic skills

Encourage academic integrity by helping students develop strong academic skills. Encourage your students to ask for help from the academics in the Learning Lounge located in the Central and Sturt libraries.

Refer your students to the Student Learning Centre website to find excellent resources that will help them develop a range of skills including time management, paraphrasing and quoting, reading effectively, referencing and academic writing.

Course design

Construct course and assessment design that promotes learning and reduces opportunities for academic misconduct. Academic integrity for staff is a FLO site for staff that contains resources to support course and assessment design that encourage student academic integrity, a self-paced online tutorial and practice text-matching software dropbox.

Text-matching software

Flinders University has a licence for using text-matching software via Flinders Learning Online (FLO). Staff are reminded that it is their responsibility to ensure that they are familiar with the use of text matching software and the interpretation of text-matching similarity reports.

A self-paced on-line tutorial is available for staff to familiarise themselves with general principles and practices around academic integrity as well as the interpretation of similarity reports produced by text-matching software.

If you require technical support in using text-matching software, contact your elearning (FLO) support.

Understand the process

As a staff member you should know and understand your rights and responsibilities. Furthermore you are required to understand the process of managing an alleged failure to meet academic integrity requirements. Information about processes is provided in the Student Academic Integrity policy and procedures.