Academic Integrity Syllabus Statement

Example from Dr. Catherine Rawn

Supporting Learning with Academic Integrity

In the academic community—a community of which you are now a part—we deal in ideas. That’s our currency, our way of advancing knowledge. By representing our own and others’ contributions in an honest way, we are (1) respecting the rules of this academic community, and (2) showcasing how our own novel ideas are distinct from but relate to their ideas. APA style gives us a formal way to indicate where our ideas end and where others’ begin. But academic integrity goes well beyond formal citation. Welcome to the academic community. You are expected to act honestly and ethically in all your academic activities, just like the rest of us.

Make sure you understand UBC’s definitions of academic misconduct, potential consequences, and expectation that students must clarify how academic integrity applies for a given assignment. Please ask if you’re not sure. (While you’re checking out the calendar, you might want to check out the “Student Declaration and Responsibility” statement you agreed to when you registered.)

What does academic integrity look like in this course? At any time: if you are unsure if a certain type of assistance is authorized, please ask. If you have a need that is unmet by existing course materials, course structure, and/or our learning community members, please ask.

• DO your own work. All individual work that you submit should be completed by you and submitted by you. All assessments, large and small, are designed to help you learn Research Methods. It is unacceptable to use an editor (paid or unpaid) without my permission to revise, correct, or alter your work, because your submission is no longer your own work. It is unacceptable to buy/sell/swap/share assignment questions or answers on any platform. It is unacceptable to misrepresent your identity by using someone else to complete any portion of a course (e.g., comment on a discussion board, complete a test question). It is unacceptable to help someone else cheat. It is generally unacceptable to use Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI, e.g., ChatGPT) tools when you are preparing your written work for submission in this course (including quizzes, tests, reflections, papers), as the work you are presenting should be your own. However, I understand this is new ethical technological territory, and we may critically engage with these tools during class time together. Our understanding of uses may evolve; if you are unsure, come have a discussion with me.
• AVOID collusion. Collusion is a form of academic integrity violation that involves working too closely together without authorization, such that the resulting submitted work gains unfair advantage over other students because is a measurement of the group/pair/others’ understanding rather than the individual understanding (definition adapted from OpenLearn). For example, collusion on a test includes working together to write answers or answering someone else’s question in a WhatsApp chat. See more examples of collusion here. Assignments that are explicitly the product of group collaboration (e.g., Poster) have authorization, so don’t count as collusion. Preparing to individually complete an assignment or test by studying together (e.g., discussing concepts, quizzing each other and giving feedback on each others’ answers) doesn’t count as collusion. In this course, your final paper should be individually written; you are presenting your own representation of the research project you previously developed in collaboration with others.
  • Can I work with a classmate to co-create study notes? Yes, you can create your own original collaborative notes (but see below). I recommend using the features in Canvas groups, or Microsoft Teams, to ensure your work remains protected. If using Canvas groups: send me a message using Canvas Inbox, and I’ll create a Group just for you so you can upload and share notes, and work collaboratively on Pages (see this site for an introduction to these features). If using Microsoft Teams, see this site for information and let me know if I can help. Once you’ve decided on a platform, I recommend starting your collaboration with a written agreement that addresses integrity issues, such as these: Who else can see/use/contribute to these notes? How will we ensure we are not violating copyright?
• DO NOT share materials provided for you to use in this course. We are working hard to provide all the materials you need to succeed in this course. In return, please respect our work. All assignment instructions, test/quiz questions and answers, discussion questions, announcements, PowerPoint slides, Canvas modules, and any other materials provided to you by the Teaching Team or in the textbook are for use in this course by students currently enrolled in PSYC 217 Sections 1 and 2. It is unacceptable to share any of these materials beyond our course, including by posting on file-sharing websites (e.g., CourseHero, Google Drive). It is unacceptable to copy and paste sentences from the textbook (e.g., definitions) into for-profit software (e.g., Quizlet) for use in studying. Respect the Teaching Team and textbook authors’ intellectual property, and follow copyright law.
• DO acknowledge others’ ideas. Scholars build on the work of others, and give credit accordingly—this is a quality of strong academic writing. In this course, you will learn and practice ways to acknowledge others’ work. Citing our sources in both formal and informal ways will be essential, and appropriate, depending on the assignment. For example, much of the way I think and write about academic integrity has been influenced by the work of Dr. Laurie McNeill, including her excellent wiki that curated many of the above links, as well as Dr. Sarah Elaine Eaton, including her webinar series. (See what I just did there? In informal writing we can use links and embed references to our fellow humans who informed our thinking. They’re my ideas and written in my own words, but I’d be thinking differently if it weren’t for my encounter with their scholarly work. When we write more formally, such as for the Research Report in this course, psychologists often use APA style conventions to cite and reference.)

DO learn to avoid unintentional plagiarism. Visit the Learning Commons’ guide to academic integrity to help you organize your writing as well as understand how to prevent unintentional plagiarism, which can be challenging when first learning to paraphrase. Visit http://learningcommons.ubc.ca/resource-guides/avoiding-plagiarism/. An example tip: Do not copy and paste text from other sources, including other people’s work or results from Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools, even in a draft. It’s easy to unintentionally misrepresent those words as your own in a later draft (which would still qualify as plagiarism). Please feel free to ask (have I said that enough?).

Excerpt from full syllabus.

Example from Dr. Joss Ives

Academic Integrity Policies

We expect that all of your submitted work represents something where you have made significant intellectual contributions and where that work ultimately reflects your understanding of the material. Below we outline how these policies apply to specific aspects of the course. It is always better to check with us if you are unsure about your level of intellectual contribution rather than to later find yourself engaged in academic misconduct procedures.

Collaborative work: We expect you to work collaboratively with a partner from the perspective of planning your experimental approaches, collecting your data and planning your data analysis. You are welcome to share data files with each other, but when possible we encourage you to each collect data to help catch data recording errors. Beyond this, we want each of you to take full responsibility for producing your own lab notebook, executing your own analysis, as well as producing your own graphical communication and oral presentation materials. As was the case in Physics 119, this can be summed up as “share ideas, not content”. You are always welcome to discuss your approaches with your partner, to confirm results and to learn from your partner’s approaches. At no point should your work be copied, paraphrased or modified directly from that of your partner.

Scientific integrity: You should never invent nor alter data, as this something that undermines experimental science completely. Additionally, you should not take any aspect of work done by other students from this course (past or present) and present it as your own.

Generative AI: You are welcome to use ChatGPT and other Generative AI to help support your coding in this class, for purposes such as data analysis, fitting and producing plots. Please provide attribution / disclosure of how it was used. The written tasks in this course are constructed such that you should not need to make use of Generative AI for these. If there is ever a written task in this course where you feel you would benefit from using Generative AI, please consult your instructor first. If we determine that it is appropriate use, we will communicate disclosure expectations to you at that time. Use of Generative AI outside of this process will be considered academic misconduct.

Example from Dr. Joss Ives

Course policies on academic integrity and plagiarism

Share ideas, not content

Academic culture has its own set of norms and expectations surrounding academic integrity and plagiarism. As developing academics, we hope to help you navigate these norms and meet these expectations. UBC offers an online guide to preventing unintentional plagiarism and organizing your writing.

Please visit the UBC calendar page on academic misconduct for a detailed discussion of academic integrity and plagiarism.

The following advice details how to avoid the most common academic misconduct issues that occur in this lab course, issues which may result in grades of zero on that lab and a letter to the Dean’s office / head of program:

• Prelab notebooks: A major emphasis of this course is the development of Jupyter notebook skills and the prelabs are where you start this process. It is essential that everyone develop skills and confidence through practice during the prelab. As such, we expect that you will start each prelab with a blank template notebook (unless otherwise specified) and that all prelab-related work be done in your own notebook. This means that data, notes and code entry, as well as the creation of graphs was executed by you and that none of this work was copied from another source. There may be exceptions to this rule when prelab work involves working with your spreadsheet from the previous week, but these exceptions will be communicated clearly.
• In-lab notebooks: You are not permitted to use another student’s prelab or in-lab notebook as the starting point for your own work. Copying and pasting from the work of another student counts as plagiarism. You can (and are encouraged to) copy and paste from your own work, and from templates provided to you in the course materials.
• Sharing notebooks or spreadsheets: You should never send a copy of your notebook or any of your work to another student (this is considered assisting in plagiarism and is academic misconduct) nor should you be in possession of copies of notebooks belonging to other students.
• Text in notebooks: Ideas can be shared, but written text should be your own words that represent your understanding (strategically changing the wording or paraphrasing your partner’s work is still plagiarism). Discuss your ideas with your partner and lab-mates, but we should NEVER see anybody copying from or reading and paraphrasing the words from someone else’s work.
• Generative AI tools (e.g. ChatGPT). You are responsible for the work you submit in your lab notebooks and prelabs. As such the use of tools such as ChatGPT and other similar tools, to write any part of your lab notes is not acceptable and will be considered academic misconduct. Your time in the lab is limited and is best spent performing experiments, analyzing data, reflecting on your results, and interacting with those around you, rather than interacting with a Gen AI tool. These tools are designed to produce the most statistically plausible text result and not necessarily the correct one. Your best resource in this class are your peers and the instructional team; we are here to help you succeed.

Example from Dr. Joss Ives

Academic Integrity and Collaboration

The academic community is built on honesty, civility, and integrity. As a member of this community, you are expected to understand and follow UBC’s codes of conduct regarding academic integrity.

At its core, academic integrity means:

• Submitting only original work done by you
• Acknowledging all sources of information and ideas
• Not copying, or misrepresenting someone else’s work as your own

Violations—such as plagiarism or cheating—may result in serious consequences, including your work being permanently considered Not Submitted, or referral to the Dean’s office, where formal records are kept.

You can find full university policies on academic integrity in the UBC Academic Calendar.

Your Intellectual Contribution

All submitted or presented work should reflect your own understanding and demonstrate your significant intellectual contributions. This applies to code and written content, whether or not it was supported by Generative AI (GenAI) tools.

Using GenAI is acceptable when your engagement with it involves meaningful use of your skills and course knowledge. For example:

• Iteratively refining prompts to produce working code
• Carefully testing, debugging, and improving AI-generated code based on your understanding

However, tasks in this course are not intended to be completed simply by searching for solutions or using one-line GenAI prompts. If you’re unsure whether your use of a tool meets expectations, ask the teaching team—it’s always better to check than risk an academic misconduct case.

Policies regarding Generative AI

This course encourages the responsible use of GenAI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, CoPilot, Gemini) as part of your computational toolkit.

We’ll practice prompt design, code evaluation, and debugging together. Unless otherwise stated, you must:

• Attribute any code or ideas generated with help from GenAI
• Describe how GenAI supported your work, especially when used for troubleshooting or structuring code

You don’t need to share exact prompts, but your attribution should reflect your process. For example:

“After modifying the Project 1 starter code to incorporate friction, I noticed objects were traveling backward after stopping. I asked CoPilot about this behavior, and it helped me revise the code.”

Additional Academic Integrity Policies in PHYS 210

• Attribution: It’s fine to use small snippets of code from peers or online sources if you credit them properly. For GenAI, larger sections of code are acceptable only if you’ve made significant intellectual contributions (as described above) and clearly explain how the tool supported your work.
• Formal group work: Collaboration is encouraged! You should engage actively in group activities and ensure you understand all group-generated work. Ask questions, contribute, and learn together.
• Individual work: Submitting a shared or copied version of a project, whether directly or slightly modified, is not acceptable. Individual submissions must represent your own work and understanding.

Academic Integrity

The academic enterprise is founded on honesty, civility, and integrity. As members of this enterprise, all students are expected to know, understand, and follow the university policies and codes of conduct regarding academic integrity. At the most basic level, this means consistently submitting only work that is your own and reflects your knowledge and skills, and acknowledging all sources of information or ideas, attributing them to others as required. This also means you should not cheat, copy, or mislead others about what is your work; nor should you help others to do the same. For example, it is prohibited to: share your past assignments and answers with other students; access materials to receive an unfair advantage; work with other students on an assignment when an instructor has not expressly given permission; or spread information that subverts the fair evaluation of an assessment through word of mouth, social media, or other channels. Violations of academic integrity (i.e., misconduct) lead to the breakdown of the academic enterprise; therefore serious consequences arise, and severe academic penalties are imposed. Incidents of plagiarism or cheating may result in a mark of zero on the assignment or exam and more serious consequences may apply if the matter is referred to the President’s Advisory Committee on Student Discipline. Careful records are kept in order to monitor and prevent recurrences.

More information can be found in the UBC Academic Calendar statement on Academic Misconduct.