Good academic practice

At university, you are expected to deliver work that is scholarly, ethical and trustworthy and this is achieved through good academic practice. This means acknowledging where you have built upon the ideas of others, trusting that you will always credit your sources, achieving grades fairly from your own work, and working respectfully alongside your fellow students and the wider academic community.

Let’s briefly touch on how we work towards following good academic practice. But don’t worry, we will cover this again in further detail later in this zone.

Referencing

Good references show that you are aware of the previous work done in your field, that you understand how that work informs your ideas, ensure that the curious reader can easily find your sources, and that you have given honest recognition to the work of other people.

If you reference well when taking notes, you will be able to check sources later, rather than thinking "where did I pick up that notion?" We will discuss referencing in more depth later in this zone.

Choosing good quality sources

In the previous zone, we examined the importance of choosing good quality sources for your work, written by acknowledged experts in your field, free from intellectual bias or the desire to promote a particular school of thought. Following this advice will help you to produce scholarly, ethical and trustworthy work.

Using sources effectively

Imagine you read a source that makes a difficult or confusing argument. After taking the time to read it a few times, you understand it. Then you sit back and think, "From the other things I have studied, I agree/disagree/have my reservations about this argument." What do you do next?

Sometimes, you may identify an actual flaw in the argument. Writer A has not taken into account certain clear evidence. Writer B has applied a completely irrelevant statistical analysis to the data. But, more usually, Writer A just disagrees with Writer B and you need to tease out which of them has the stronger case. It's like evidence in a court case: who do you believe, and why?