# 2.3 Being a member of an academic community

When you register on a course to begin studying, you are becoming a member of a diverse academic community.

All members of that community, whether new students or experienced academics, work to maintain standards of intellectual honesty and transparency.

If someone uses another persons’ work without appropriate attribution – i.e. if they plagiarise – it demonstrates a lack of respect to the originators of that work.

Take a moment to consider how you might feel if you worked hard on a piece of work and then discovered that someone else had claimed credit for your carefully thought through arguments or calculations.

How might you feel about other students on your programme of study, who seemed to be doing better than you and were gaining higher marks, but who copied their answers from online sources or were submitting work that someone else had done for them?

How might you feel about the qualifications obtained from an institution which did not value academic integrity?

### Answer

Your responses to these questions are likely to help to illustrate why institutions place such high value on you producing assignments that are all your own work.

Plagiarism indicates a lack of academic integrity which has impacts beyond the individual person or a particular assessment. It may result in loss of credibility and trust – at an individual, institutional and wider societal level.

OpenLearn - All my own work: exploring academic integrity
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