Academic Integrity

When you are studying for a degree at an institute of higher education, you must maintain academic standards and quality that will be reflected in your assessments and class work.

As a higher education student, we expect you to learn and display these standards in your assessments by using academically appropriate language, style, grammar, formatting, and avoiding plagiarism through correct referencing. At Sydney International, we are here to support you with developing the knowledge and skills to maintain academic standards.

Good academic practice

Good academic practice means that you show personal integrity and a respect for academic scholarship. When we assess your understanding of a subject by assessment tasks, such as essays, reports, and projects, you may need to do someindependent research. To do this research, you will have to refer to the work of various scholars who are authorities in the field. This is normal academic practice because all academic scholarship depends, in some way, on building on the work of others.

Plagiarism and cheating

Plagiarism and cheating can be intentional or unintentional attempts to deceive the marker or examiner. They can be seen as acts of academic misconduct for which students may be penalised as described in the rules and School policies relating to student misconduct and appeals.

Plagiarism includes, but is not limited to:

copying words, or ideas, from websites, reference books, journals, newspapers or other sources without acknowledging the source.
paraphrasing (to change the words but keep the ideas) material taken from other sources, without acknowledging the source.
downloading material from the internet and including it as part of your own work without acknowledging the source.
copying work, such as all or part of an assignment, from other persons and submitting it as your own work.

When completing your assessment tasks, you need to make sure that you use a referencing system to acknowledge your sources. At Sydney International, we have a range of resources and workshops to help you get ahead with your referencing and to understand academic integrity.