Essay on the Significance of Academic and Professional Integrity

This essay delves into the critical importance of academic and professional integrity. It defines academic integrity as adhering to ethical standards and avoiding actions like cheating and plagiarism, emphasizing the significance of honesty. Professional integrity is presented as a code of ethics cr...Read More

Running Head: INTEGRITY 0
ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL INIGRITY
System04116
4/8/2019

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Academic integrity is a kind of ethical code for academics. It means maintaining with the standards of
academics and avoiding the things such as cheating and plagiarism. Honesty is part of this thing as it is
important to do things in an honest and ethical manner. In the same way, professional integrity is the
code of ethics that a person should adopt In order to use the knowledge, skills and values in the
profession they choose to do. (Edgar and Pattison, 2011).
A student with integrity is someone who is honesty. In a student the values and morals sets a character
of a student and maintains academic integrity of a student at a university.
Students who work with more integrity tend to work hard in order to earn their degrees in an honest
and fair manner as they put all of their hard work in completing the assignments. When a student cheats
intentionally in the university, they actually compromise in their degree and the morals of an individual
and value of the degree vanishes. Apart from the university, this thing also goes ahead in the work
environment, which highly affects the work goals as well (Cribb, 2011).
A lot of surveys and studies show that the students or people who focus more on the dishonest and
unethical practices in schools, college or universities are more likely to become cheat, frauds and can
steal at their workplace as well. The academic integrity is important and has high level of importance for
everyone with the community of university as a fair conduct can help in maintaining the academic
practices and community. For the students as well there are many benefits as this thing helps in
ensuring fairness in the procedure the way credits are earned and awarded to the students (Macfarlane,
Zhang and Pun, 2014).
In the academic and professional integrity all the dishonesty related to academic are considered to be
seriously unethical and a violation to the code of conduct (Noelliste, 2013). All of this thing are managed
or handled by the academic integrity committee. Many behaviors are strictly not allowed in academic
integrity, which is copying, from some other student, allowing the other to copy, selling copy of
assignments, buying, and selling work without permission. Apart from this even stealing, destroying and
other academic work is strictly prohibited (Mastin, Peszka and Lilly, 2009).
Maintaining honesty and Integrity in a workplace is important, as it is important to maintain and have a
code of conduct. Things like quality of having integrity and honesty can lead to gaining trust, which also

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helps in improving level of competence, which also results in gaining respect success and personal as
well as professional development.
An employee who is able to perform his/her duties and is able to maintain integrity and honesty is
recognized to be as one of the best employees, it also leads him/her to success and also helps in getting
better results along with the quality. Quality, which is always looked and preferred in the employees, as
it can lead to the accomplishment of those results that are needed or planned. It is always seen that that
an honest employee is the one who is the leading promoter of organization and its goals and also the
objectives and he/she can put his/her solemn energies accordingly to the total organizational,
efficiencies, effectiveness and competencies.
Academic integrity is important for many reasons. The First reason is having academic integrity simply
states that others can trust student and the people who the students know or rely on such as teachers
can expect a student to act honestly (Bretag, 2016) .
Moreover, one of the key characteristics of a successful leader is trust. An individual can develop good
reputations by being a fair, trustworthy and honest. The whole world is based on trust people do on
each other. Therefore, it is very important to build good ethical habits while a person is in college, this
will also help them to be honest in a workplace Second thing in which having academic integrity plays an
important role is that it adds value to the degree(Jones, 2011).
Employers are always in look for those graduates who they can believe to have a high amount of
personal integrity. Apart from this academic integrity can play an important in the life of an individual as
well as such things can help in offering students peace of mind, apart from this it also reduces stress
and makes a person more productive and happier.
Ways in which academic integrity can be managed are firstly it is very important to educate the
students about the things that are included in academic integrity. After that it is important to see if the
syllabus is up to the expectations, after that the teachers can also quiz all the students about the
academic integrity and the course policies at the time of orientation to know the knowledge of the
student. After this, it is also important to change the assignments in ever semester in order to create its
three or four versions and to rotate it throughout the year. Students often use the course material and
share them on certain sites such as Course Hero and that is why it is important to change the
assignment material. Another thing, which can be done, is that the universities can make use of

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software’s such as Turnitin.com in order to ensure that the assignments do not contain plagiarism
(Banks, 2012).
This essay is a study of why academic and professional integrity are important. Academic and
professional integrity means following an ethical behavior or a code of conduct and staying honest at
work and university. All these things add values to the degree and make an indivisiual a better person as
well. Academic integrity can be used in a university in many ways. Almost all the universities nowadays
tell the importance of academic integrity to the students from the time of orientation.

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REFERENCES
Banks, S. (2012) Professional integrity, social work and the ethics of distrust. Social Work and Social
Sciences Review, 11(2), pp.20-35.
Bretag, T. ed. (2016) Handbook of academic integrity.Singapore: Springer.
Cribb, A. (2011) Integrity at work: managing routine moral stress in professional roles. Nursing
philosophy, 12(2), pp.119-127.
Edgar, A. and Pattison, S. (2011) Integrity and the moral complexity of professional practice. Nursing
philosophy, 12(2), pp.94-106.
Jones, D.L. (2011) Academic dishonesty: Are more students cheating?. Business Communication
Quarterly, 74(2), pp.141-150.
Macfarlane, B., Zhang, J. and Pun, A. (2014) Academic integrity: a review of the literature. Studies in
Higher Education, 39(2), pp.339-358.
Mastin, D.F., Peszka, J. and Lilly, D.R. (2009)Online academic integrity. Teaching of Psychology, 36(3),
pp.174-178.
Noelliste, M. (2013) Integrity: An intrapersonal perspective. Human Resource Development
Review, 12(4), pp.474-499.