Academic Integrity in a Digital Age

Responsibility is a term used in our daily life. It refers to a set of tasks or functions that employers, students, lecturer, professional body, court of law or some other recognised body can legitimately demand. In the context of this course, responsibility refers to tasks or functions a student and a lecturer can legitimately demand. It is common to hear somebody is responsible for something. One can therefore attribute responsibility to the state of being the person who caused something to happen or a duty or task that one is required or the state or fact of having a duty to deal with something or of having control over someone. Academic communities have the right to expect that the values of academic integrity and scholarship will be upheld.

In some cases, responsibility can be the opportunity or ability to act independently and make decisions without authorization. Responsibility is a value of academic integrity as each individual in academia has a role to play and hence responsibility to fulfil. Responsible individuals hold themselves accountable for their own actions, and work to discourage and prevent misconduct by others. Academic integrity means honesty and responsibility in scholarship. Academic assignments exist to help students learn; grades exist to show how fully this goal is attained. Therefore, all student work and all grades should result from the student's own understanding and effort. This places responsibilities to both the student and the college staff. The student has a responsibility of fulfilling academic tasks seriously and the lecturers have a role to teach and assess student attainment of the goals set. It should be understood that holding oneself and others to high standards of integrity is often challenging; it requires courage.  The responsibility to respect ethical conduct in research and other academic work is the responsibility of the learners and the learning ecology. It is important also to stress that in academic work, be it research or any publication one or more of the authors, as the corresponding author, shall take responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole.