Academic honesty is an alternative word more commonly used for academic integrity. The term first coined by Don McCobe who emphasized on adopting an honest behavior in education system.
The other side of this usually considered as academic dishonesty is defined by center of academic integrity as a behavior of academic achievement including cheating, plagiarism, lying, deception and other form of advantage unfairly obtained by one student over other.
When we discuss about it in terms of education system, academic integrity is not restricted to students and plagiarism. However, it is a much wider term applicable to every stake holder and everybody should exhibit it to make this world an honest place to thrive.
The international center of academic integrity makes it stand on six important pillars and each of them should be inculcated in the student from very child hood, if they want to show these traits at adolescent. When we talk about IB philosophy many schools get restricted to citation and for making academically honest PYP, MYP and DP student they only preach MLA/ APA or any other citation style or avoid plagiarism and collusion. They just overlook the attitude of honesty which should be displayed before reaching these heavy terms.
Therefore it is very important to first understand these six pillars and it’s important at different levels:
Teacher’s role in spreading Academic honesty
| PYP | MYP | DP |
| Provide simple examples of academic honesty.Encourage sharing of ideas with friends and parents.Encourage students to participate in group discussion.Teach them to acknowledge the author of the information that they used for their work | Encourage students to make process journalGive opportunities of paraphrasingEducate students about copy right laws and ensure that such videos/clips are not used for commercial gain.Promote the importance of bibliography.Make students aware of various terms used in Academic honesty policy. | Encourage students to formulate their own ideas.Encourage to cite all information using consistent and appropriate citation style.Promote the use of the software used for plagiarism check like turnitin/ urkund |
Strategies teachers can adopt to check Plagiarism:
- Look for the clues like mixed citation style, missing quotes or references, unusual formatting, discontinuity in flow of understanding, language used seems mix match.
- Find the source of paper: research few lines of the submitted document and try finding the original source, research some original database on that topic.
- Ask questions on the written information
- Ask student to write his/her understanding on the topic
- Do plagiarism check