Welcome to this guide on academic integrity. Whether you're new to university or you're an experienced scholar, we hope you'll find this guide helpful. If you're a student at Royal Roads University (RRU) and you have questions about anything in this guide, please contact the Writing Centre.
We acknowledge with respect and gratitude that the Colwood and Langford campuses of RRU are located on the traditional Lands of the Lekwungen-speaking peoples, the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations. We created this guide as uninvited guests on these lands, and we've included many photos taken by RRU staff of people, buildings, animals, and outdoor spaces that have relationships with the Colwood campus. We're grateful for the opportunities to work and learn on these lands that have been a gathering place for millenia.
Photo © Royal Roads University
We support RRU students to become more comfortable and confident in the choices they make regarding academic integrity. Here's how we do that:
We share information and provide confidential, critical thinking-based coaching to students to support them as they learn to use academic integrity skills with confidence. A key piece of this approach is helping students understand and develop their relationship to academic integrity as members of the RRU community. For more information, visit Who are you? How do your experiences affect your understanding of academic integrity?
We use a person-first approach that focuses on compassion and empathy. We’re also aware of how colonial Western definitions and approaches to academic integrity can impact students and be at odds with their values and experiences e.g., Western approaches often assume people have inherent rights to access and/or share all information and that people “own” information. See Perspectives of academic integrity for more information.
We align our resources and support to reflect RRU's academic integrity policy while also acknowledging that other institutions and cultures' approaches to academic integrity may differ. We welcome discussions of those differences in pursuit of students seeing themselves and their values reflected in RRU's academic integrity policy. See RRU vision and values and academic integrity for how we’re connecting RRU’s academic integrity policy to organizational values.
We help students to understand expectations that reflect RRU's academic integrity policy, but we will not assess academic integrity or intervene in disputes. We help students to understand RRU's academic integrity policy and information provided by instructors. Instructors communicate academic integrity expectations for their courses and teach students how to meet those expectations through instruction, feedback, and assessment. The procedure outlined in Academic Integrity and Misconduct – Students specifies the process if academic misconduct is suspected.
Photo © Royal Roads University
Our goals for this guide are to:
Normalize that students have differing understandings and levels of familiarity with North American concepts of academic integrity;
Normalize and support that learning and adaptation are necessary in order to understand and demonstrate RRU's academic integrity policies;
Present practical, easy to understand explanations and suggestions; and,
Give RRU students clear pathways for how they can contact the Writing Centre for assistance.
Photo © Royal Roads University
We're using questions to help people connect to the content in this guide. We hope you'll find questions similar to questions you have, or you might even find questions you haven't thought of before! We also want to show that if you have questions about academic integrity, you're not the only one, and asking questions is a great starting point to learn more.
Here are some questions to get you started, and you'll find more questions and information in each section:
Image by Tim from Pixabay
