Academic Integrity Policy changes – what you need to know
Deakin is updating the Student Academic Integrity Policy from Trimester 1/Semester 1 2023 after broad consultation across the university to take a more educative approach to ensuring students act with academic integrity.
Why academic integrity is important
Academic integrity is one of the foundations of university culture. It ensures you create and submit your work in an honest and fair way, act and communicate ethically and show respect for the work of others.
Breaching academic integrity can result in significant consequences for yourself ranging from a formal warning to permanent expulsion from the University or the rescinding of a degree. It could even have an ongoing impact on your future academic or professional career.
To avoid these risks, all students have a responsibility to ensure they understand and follow all academic integrity rules and responsibilities whenever completing and submitting an assessment task.
So, what has changed?
Early intervention
From S1/T1 Deakin will implement an early intervention process to offer some students a chance to correct areas of poor academic practice, such as poor referencing or paraphrasing, without receiving an allegation of breach of academic integrity.
If you’re eligible, you’ll be given one opportunity to correct areas of poor academic practice and resubmit your work within seven days.
To be eligible for an early intervention, you must meet the following criteria:
- have received no more than one prior early intervention in a particular unit in the same study period
- have not received an early intervention in any unit in a previous study period
- have not used another student’s work
- have not drawn substantially on only one or two sources
- have not attempted to hide or disguise the poor academic practice.
For first year units in an undergraduate or postgraduate course, the student may earn the full range of available marks, but for all other units the student may only receive a maximum of 50% for their resubmitted task. This early intervention option is not available for online quizzes, end of unit assessments or examinations.
If the student does not meet the above criteria, does not resubmit or resubmits without successfully addressing the areas of poor academic performance, they will be reported to the relevant Academic Integrity Committee for a suspected breach of student academic integrity standards. The alleged breach will then be investigated under the Student Academic Integrity procedure.
Other changes
- Standard outcomes – There are now standard outcomes for different types of academic integrity breaches. This means that students may choose to accept the standard outcome or ask for a review meeting to discuss what happened.
- Updated academic integrity breach definitions – Definitions have been updated, including identifying the use of file-sharing sites as an academic integrity breach.
- Graduate skills – There is a renewed focus on making sure students understand the need for integrity in their future professional lives and how practicing academic integrity at university can assist this.
Find out more
You can refresh yourself on your responsibilities by visiting the Academic integrity webpage, Academic Skills Guides and use Deakin’s Referencing guide to understand the right approach for referencing your sources.