The academic enterprise is founded on honesty, civility, and integrity. As members of this enterprise, all students are expected to know, understand, and follow the codes of conduct regarding academic integrity. At the most basic level, this means submitting only original work done by you and acknowledging all sources of information or ideas and attributing them to others as required. This also means you should not cheat, copy, or mislead others about what is your work; nor should you help others to do the same. For example, it is prohibited to: share your past assignments and answers with other students; work with other students on an assignment when an instructor has not expressly given permission; or spread information through word of mouth, social media, websites, or other channels that subverts the fair evaluation of a class exercise, or assessment.
The course teaching team, UBC, and the scholarly community at large share an understanding of the ethical ways that we use to produce knowledge. A core practice of this shared value of academic integrity is that we acknowledge the contributions of others to our own work, but it also means we produce our own contributions that add to the scholarly conversation: we don’t buy or copy papers or exams, or have someone else edit them. We also don’t falsify data or sources, or hand in the same work in more than one course.
As a student, your number one task is to learn new things. Just like your professors, however, you are a member of a university scholarly community. As a part of this community, you are responsible for engaging with existing knowledge and contributing ideas of your own. Academics—including you!—build knowledge through rigorous research that expands on the contributions of others, both in the faraway past and around the world today. This is called scholarship. Academic integrity, in short, means being an honest, diligent, and responsible scholar. This includes:
Accurately reporting the results of your research, e.g., sources for data you use for modelling.
Completing assignments independently or acknowledging collaboration when appropriate. Collaboration through group work is an effective way to learn. I will clearly indicate when you should collaborate, for example during in-class group work and on some online homework assignments.
Creating and expressing your own original ideas.
Engaging with the ideas of others, both past and present, in a variety of scholarly platforms such as research journals, books by academics, lectures, etc.
Explicitly acknowledging the sources of your knowledge, especially through accurate citation practices.
The general guidelines are: We are working hard to provide all the materials you need to succeed in this course. In return, please respect our work. All assignment instructions, quiz questions and answers, discussion questions, announcements, presentation slides, audio/video recordings, Canvas modules, and any other materials provided to you by the Teaching Team or in the textbook are for use in this course by students currently enrolled [course/section]. It is unacceptable to share any of these materials beyond our course, including by posting on file-sharing websites (e.g., CourseHero, Google Docs). It is unacceptable to copy and paste sentences from the textbook (e.g., definitions) into for-profit software (e.g., Quizlet) for use in studying. Respect the Teaching Team and textbook authors’ intellectual property, and follow copyright law.
FISH 501 is, however, a bit different from the general guidelines above in that you are welcome to distribute the course materials. The more the merrier. Note though, that use in commercial / for-profit applications is prohibited per license agreement.
Violations of academic integrity (i.e., misconduct) lead to the breakdown of the academic enterprise, and therefore serious consequences arise and harsh sanctions are imposed. For example, incidences of plagiarism or cheating may result in a mark of zero on the assignment or exam and more serious consequences may apply if the matter is referred for consideration for academic discipline. Careful records are kept to monitor and prevent recurrences. Any instance of cheating or taking credit for someone else’s work, whether intentionally or unintentionally, can and often will result in at minimum a grade of zero for the assignment, and these cases will be reported to the IOF Director and Associate Dean Students of the Faculty of Science.
Feel free to ask me about academic integrity. Part of my job is to guide your growth as a scholar, and I would much rather you ask for clarification than unintentionally engage in academic misconduct, which has serious consequences. If you are unsure about what constitutes academic misconduct, please reach out to me.
Sometimes students who are experiencing a lot of stress feel the only way to deal with a situation is to cheat. Please do not do this. Talk to me, and I am sure we can work something out together.
To help you learn your responsibilities as a scholar, please read and understand UBC’s expectations for academic honesty in the UBC Calendar: “Academic Honesty,” “Academic Misconduct,” and “Disciplinary Measures,”. Read and reflect on the Student Declaration and Responsibility.
For written assignments and help with plagiarism and citation, see the Centre for Writing and Scholarly Communication website.
Additional resources for learning with integrity can be found on the UBC Academic Integrity Website.
Many course activities and some assignments are designed to be completed in groups, allowing you to work with your peers. Other assignments are individual, and you are expected to complete these by working individually and writing in your own words. It is unacceptable to have others write assignments on your behalf, to write assignments on others’ behalf, to copy other students’ work, or to allow other students to copy your work.
Over the last year, tools that use artificial intelligence algorithms to generate written content by comparison to a large dataset of training data, such as ChatGPT, have become widely accessible (these are often referred to as “generative AI tools”). Whilst these tools offer many possibilities to support learning, they also come with challenges and in this course are no substitute for one of the fundamental goals of the course, which is to learn through practicing the craft of scientific writing.
In this course, you are not required to use these tools to complete your assignments. However, should you choose to, it is acceptable to use generative AI tools to carry out a preliminary search for information and to gather ideas for further research elsewhere; you can also use other non-scholarly sources (e.g., Wikipedia) for this purpose. If you use such tools, you should be aware of the privacy implications for doing so: for more information, please refer to UBC’s Privacy Impact Assessment for generative AI tools. In addition, if you use these tools or other non-scholarly sources, you must disclose your use of them: instructions for disclosure will be provided in assignment guidelines.
In FISH 501, it is unacceptable to have a generative AI tool write assignments (or parts of assignments) on your behalf. You should be aware that generative AI tools can produce biased, false or misleading content, because of the nature of the content in the training datasets. They are designed to produce the most statistically plausible text result, not necessarily the correct one, and they cannot take responsibility for what they produce. You, on the other hand, must take responsibility for the accuracy and integrity of your written work: therefore, you should not consider the output of a generative AI tool to be reliable unless verified by information in scholarly sources, and the information included in your assignments must be found in and attributed to scholarly sources.
There are other common applications that use generative AI, including spelling and grammar editors and translation applications (e.g., Grammarly and Google Translate). You may use spelling and grammar editors to double-check an assignment draft. Similarly, you may use a translation application to translate words and short phrases that you have written in another language and wish to use in your assignment. However, it is unacceptable to write your assignment (or a substantive part of the assignment) in another language and use an application to translate it to English.
Ultimately, this course is designed to help students practice creative and critical thinking, and the ability to construct well-reasoned written arguments based on evidence. Using generative AI tools to produce entire written assignments will stifle independent thinking and undermine development of these valuable skills. If you have questions around the acceptable or unacceptable use of generative AI tools, I encourage you to discuss with me.
This page is built on guidelines from UBC Faculty of Science. The Use of AI is based on UBC Science 113 guidelines.