Academic Integrity is the expectation that all members of the Princes Hill Secondary College academic community act with honesty, trust, fairness, respect and responsibility.
Working with academic integrity means:
- Always complete your own work to the best of your ability
- Acknowledge and provide credit for ideas and resources you have used that are not your own
- Contact your teachers if you are having study problems and work with them on solutions
The opposite of academic integrity is academic misconduct. Academic misconduct is conduct that attempts to obtain unfair academic advantage through misrepresentation, plagiarism, collusion, falsification, cheating, or any other breach of academic integrity for your own gain or the benefit of others. Academic misconduct undermines learning. Some examples of academic misconduct include:
- Copying paragraphs from the internet or another source and adding this to your essay without giving the correct credit and reference to the original author
- Using AI technology to write assessments
- Asking a friend for answers to the homework questions
- Coping the answers for book work from worked solutions
- Handing in work done by a sibling or tutor as your own
- Attempting to use a phone, smart watch or computer in a test to look up information
- Telling students in another class about specific questions on a test before they do the task
Students must demonstrate academic integrity in their studies and assessment practices, and they are responsible for ensuring the authenticity and originality of all materials submitted for assessment.
Teachers need to feel confident that the work you are submitting is your own work. Some of the best ways to make sure teachers trust the academic integrity of your work are:
- Participate in class activities and discussion
- Complete set work in class in a timely manner
- Keep all notes and drafts and any work done to develop your assessment tasks
- Always credit other people’s work and ideas when you use them in your own work
- Talk to your teachers about any study difficulties you are having
If you are an active member of the class, teachers will develop an understanding of your ideas and your work and will recognise these elements when you submit formal assessments.
If a teacher does not feel confident that the work you are submitting is your own, they will report the suspected breaches to your Year Level Leader and/or Sub School Leader. It will be your responsibility to verify the authenticity of your work.
Your teacher and YLL may then:
- Interview you and ask you to explain your ideas
- Ask to see drafts or notes that led to the development of the work
- Ask you to explain working out
- Ask you to complete a similar assessment to verify the initial results (ie an additional maths quiz)
If the integrity of your work cannot be verified by this process, you may:
- Receive a score or zero for the assessment task
- Need to complete a new assessment to pass the course
- Your parents and/or guardians may be notified
- A record may be added to your Compass Chronicle