AI and Academic Integrity

Academic integrity is an underlying principle of research and academic practice. Through your work and approach to learning you are expected to demonstrate your development as an independent learner, researcher and critical thinker, including maintaining good academic practice. This involves completing your studies honestly and ethically, having respect for the work of others and recognising your responsibility to ensure fair assessment.

Poor research and academic practice or misconduct such as plagiarism, collusion, fabrication, or falsification, undermine the advancement of knowledge and innovation that are at the core of the University’s vision.

The overarching purpose of assessment is to demonstrate your understanding and ability to analyse and apply knowledge gained through your modules to your markers. Passing off someone or something's work as your own, whether this is copying in an exam, getting someone else to write an assignment on your behalf or claiming authorship of machine generated content (including text, code and creative works) means that you are not demonstrating your own skills and learning. As well as limiting your opportunities to develop as a learner, it is highly unethical.

When using AI tools to support your learning and in the development of your work you must maintain good academic practice. This will include:

• acknowledging AI sources through appropriate referencing where you have used content as an information source alongside your other reading
• demonstrating critical use of AI tools be acknowledging how, why, and when you used AI to inform your approach to the assessment or as part of the writing process

Assess your academic practice

Defining good academic practice can be quite difficult, as can understanding where the line is between acceptable use of AI and poor practice or misconduct. To help you, we have created a self-assessment tool that will ask you to consider your use of AI and good academic practice more broadly. 

Acknowledging your use of AI

Generally speaking, if you are using generative AI to support you learning and academic development, you are unlikely to need to acknowledge it. However, if you are using it to support the preparation of an assessed piece of work, you will need to acknowledge and/or reference it. 

Referencing AI generated sources

As with all sources of information you use in your work, you will need to critically evaluate any content generated using AI. In addition to acknowledging how you have used AI more broadly in your work, if you think it is appropriate for the task you have been given to use this material directly in your work, perhaps as a verbatim quotation, embedded image or figure, or by summarising and paraphrasing the materials, you must include an in text citation and reference.