Students’ Awareness of the Academic Integrity Policy at a Latvian University
International Journal for Educational Integrity 2020
Alla Anohina-Naumeca, Ilze Birzniece, Tatjana Odiņeca

An academic integrity policy usually specifies the university’s ethical principles and values, the forms of appropriate academic behaviour, the penalties for academic malpractice and the procedures for handling policy violations. However, the policy does not itself create academic integrity, but needs to be consistently and effectively communicated, implemented, and applied. This paper presents a case study investigating the extent to which students at Riga Technical University (Latvia) are informed about the university’s academic integrity policy. This quantitative research was performed by surveying two groups of respondents: domestic students in the first year of their bachelor’s studies and the heads of the corresponding study programmes. The results revealed a low level of students’ awareness of the university policy on academic integrity and a lack of systematic institutional approach to promoting academic integrity. The study results also indicated that students with a higher awareness of the university policy on academic integrity were less tolerant towards violations and perceived academic integrity as an essential aspect for both the academic community and student life. These findings establish a foundation for a more extensive discussion of academic integrity issues in Latvia. They can also serve as impetus for similar studies in other Latvian universities, as well as research taking an international comparative perspective.


Keywords
Academic integrity, Higher education, Study programme, Survey, University policy
DOI
10.1007/s40979-020-00064-4
Hyperlink
https://edintegrity.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1007/s40979-020-00064-4#article-info

Anohina-Naumeca, A., Birzniece, I., Odiņeca, T. Students’ Awareness of the Academic Integrity Policy at a Latvian University. International Journal for Educational Integrity, 2020, Vol. 16, No. 1, Article number 12. ISSN 1833-2595. Available from: doi:10.1007/s40979-020-00064-4

Publication language
English (en)
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