DS: Academic Integrity & Ethics

DL 1

A master's thesis should demonstrate that a student has ability to address her or his chosen topic independently and in a scientific way within a limited amount of time. Majority of students surely want to maintain highest standards of research integrity and ethics when working on their thesis. But as you have seen in this course, avoiding ethical missteps is not as easy as one might think.

Assignment

In this activity, we’d like you to formulate recommendations for a typical student, how to avoid ethical missteps. What to do (and what not to do) when planning the thesis research, collecting data or writing the thesis? Consider different areas of academic integrity and research ethics and write down some tips and caveats you find particularly important.

How to work on this assignment?

Step 1 Prepare the document

You will work on this assignment in groups. Your moderator will assign you into the groups. We suggest that you create a shared document for each group. You also have the opportunity to communicate with each other through this forum. The aim of this assignment is to come up with a set of recommendations together, so please make sure to start off with a brainstorm in some form to discuss the main points and divide the responsibilities. Your recommendations can take any form you prefer but should be approximately 400 words long.

Step 2 Publish the document

Now that you've come to an agreed-upon document, please submit it into the forum.

Step 3

Step 3 is an individual assignment in which we ask you to respond to a document from another group. You can do so by replying to the message in which their recommendations are shared. Review their recommendations carefully. What are the strengths of their advices? Which part of the document is most relevant to you and to your thesis?

Step 4

Comment also on the following question: Early in this course, in learning activity 1.2, you answered the question: What ethical challenges might you encounter during data collection and writing your thesis? Do you now see some things differently? Do you now foresee other ethical issues in your thesis?