Academic Integrity - Essay Example

Prof’s Academic Integrity Academic integrity, to me, means following a few simple precepts. Always do your own work, and when using someone else’s work, give them credit through a citation. Following these two simple rules will allow you to ensure that you are not accidentally or intentionally being academically dishonest. Academic integrity is important for a university for a number of reasons. The first is the culture of Academia. In academia, a person’s only source of wealth or prestige is their ideas.

Academic integrity ensures that when someone has a good idea, they get proper credit for what they have thought of or done. If this was not the case, there would be very little incentive to come up with new or innovative ideas. Secondly, a university gives a degree that is supposed to assure people (whether prospective employers, other universities, or anyone else) that a student has certain basic skills like critical thinking and writing ability. In a space with poor academic integrity, there is no guarantee of those skills, which means the university degree is worth less.

I would not want to attend a school with poor academic integrity standards, because that would defeat much of the purpose of going to school in the first place. If a school is not rigorous in assuring that students do their own work, how are employers in my future supposed to think that my degree actually means something? A school with poor academic integrity standards is simply not worth attending.