Question

Integrity is key to maintaining credibility in one's chosen profession. Understanding that academic integrity inherently requires one to credit original authors for their contributions and efforts, and only take credit for their own original work, what is the role of academic referencing in the university setting, and why is it important to learn best practices such as APA referencing as you learn and develop your academic writing skills? In your response consider the Virk article, and the approach being considered by the U.K. government to address the issue of plagiarism in academic work.

Answer 1

Academic integrity is the key to success as it also aims at doing an honest job and not taking the credit of work performed by some other person. It is the moral duty to provide due credit to the actual author who had worked so hard. Academic integrity is widely used at the university level where the referencing is used for giving credit to the actual author. Providing referencing also helps in removing plagiarism from the content. Referencing also helps in showing that a person knows his field as he had researched various topics which are related to his field of work. The referencing helps the students as they can use the knowledge of the researchers which they have gained by spending many years and the students can utilize that by providing references. Learning best practices such as APA referencing helps in making the topics easy which are very complex things. The flow of the paper is also maintained and the focus in on the paper due to a proper format and referencing style which is used in the paper. The evaluation also becomes easier with the help of proper formatting of the paper. Plagiarism is a very serious issue that is related to the writing of any content. It is unethical practices of copying someone's work and presenting it as one's work. Plagiarism is not treated as a criminal offense in the UK. It is not treated as an illegal offense until and unless it has undergone any kind of copyright issue or any kind of fraud. It may lead to a reduction of grades and it also leads to failure is an assignment. The universities have the right to charge penalties to the students and serious actions can be taken against those students who have plagiarised the content. They have even made a Quality Assurance Agency for design with such issues ate the university level.