Dear students,
Welcome to the second semester of 2018. Those of you who are joining us for the first semester - welcome and nice to meet you. Those of you who are re-joining us - welcome back and nice to see you again.
Over the course of semester I will be updating you on important changes to
policies and procedures as well as initiatives developed to assist your
learning. The first such change is outlined below.
In the course of the normal compliance cycle all Endeavour policies are updated to align with the current best practice across the Higher Education sector. Over the last semester, Academic Integrity policy was updated to:
1. decrease the Turnitin similarity score to 15%: "Markers will assess all Turnitin scores and in instances where Turnitin returns a similarity score of 15% or more, the lecturer is required to automatically investigate the Turnitin report and determine whether the score is reflective of plagiarism, any other academic dishonesty" - this means that lecturers must check any assessment that has returned a score of 15% or more
2. Markers will check all assessment even if it is below 15% similarity score to check for any block copying (e.g. copying half a paragraph from another source): "Investigations should be made if plagiarism is suspected in instances lower that 15%."
3. Markers will be aware of marking assessment that has potential to return high similarity score due to assessment design (e.g. when guidelines for the assignment ask you to copy questions which you need to answer, or if you are filling in tables where whole class needs to be ordering words in a specific order or any iterative assessment) but please be aware that markers will still check the assessment for any instances of copying.
We do not have a cover page at Endeavour but you will be asked to tick a box before you submit an assignment that ask you if what you are submitting is your own work. By ticking this box you are assuring us that you have produced the assignment which you are submitting completely by yourself. Therefore, to inform you about the Academic Integrity and to make the process of recognising instances of academic dishonesty easier for the students, we have designed an Academic Integrity Module found HERE or you can find it in your own LMS “My courses” dropdown menu:
- Every student enrolled from 30th August, 2018 (all on campus and online students) will need to complete this module. This includes students who are joining us for the first time AND students who are currently enrolled in first/second semester subjects and onwards.
- Academic Integrity Module contains lesson on Academic Integrity, defines plagiarism and different forms of academic dishonesty with specific videos explaining the Turnitin software; once you have completed a section of a module you will be asked to answer several multi-choice questions and you will need to attain 100% on the module. If you have responded to the question incorrectly the lesson will take you back to the part where you can read about that specific question again and then ask you the same question. This will continue until you have correctly answered all the questions – only then you have successfully completed the Academic Integrity module.
- You are required to complete the module within the first 4 weeks of your semester (if you are currently taking both on campus and online subjects please complete the module only once). At the end of the 4 weeks we will contact you if you have not completed the module.
- If you have any further questions about Academic Integrity please make an appointment with your Senior Lecturer or with the Library – we are always happy to help.
Thank you for your attendance to this extremely important issue and happy learning.
Kind regards,
Dr Andrea Bugarcic
Director of Education