Academic Honesty

Academic honesty is the process through which we make "knowledge, understanding, and thinking transparent" (Inernational Baccalaureate Organization 1). The ideas and sources that we use in our work must be credited as we did not create them. The academic honesty process allows your teachers and evaluators to understand your thought process (where your ideas came from), and how you reached your conclusions. It also allows them to assess the quality of your sources, thereby evaluating your understanding of them. Finally, academic honesty promotes the producton of authentic new ideas.

Demonstrating our thought process is important because it allows others to: replicate, corroborate, refute, and even expand on our thesis.

To further understand why academic honesty is so important, we shall explore some situations of Academic Misconduct:

Examples of Academic Misconduct:

Plagiarism:

Not crediting a source for their material (this being ideas, images, lyrics, comments, etc.). Or, citing the IBO, "representing, intentionally or unintentionally, ideas, words, or any kind of work created by a person without acknowledging them clearly, correctly and explicitly". Plagiarism can be accidental, so always make sure to correctly cite any affirmation or opinion.

Collusion:

Conspiring with another person to commit an act of academic dishonesty. The IBO describes this as "facilitating another candidate's dishonesty, either by allowing your work to be copied by another candidate or sent to an evaluator under their name".

Contract Cheating:

Also known as buying and/or selling someone's work. Dishonesty occurs on both sides of this arrangement, as the buyer incurs in plagiarism and the seller in collusion.

Duplication of work:

Handing in the same piece of work for different tasks with different evaluation criteria. This is considered Self Plagiarism.

Falsifying information:

Intentionally altering or inventing the content of information or crediting one source for another source's work.

As IB Learners we must avoid these Academic Misconduct practices to become better people.