15th October 2022

St. Teresa's Institute of Education had organised a webinar on Academic Integrity on 15th October 2022. The session was conducted under the guidance of Dr. Shakuntala Nighot, librarian of St. Teresa's Institute of Education. In all there were 55 participants including the students and the faculty members.

The guest speaker for the webinar was Dr. Sujata Rajpurkar, librarian of St. Andrew's college, Bandra. Objectives of the webinar were to guide future educators about the importance of Academic integrity in academic research and allow students and staff the freedom to build new ideas, knowledge and creative works while also respecting and acknowledging the work of others.

The webinar began with Dr. Shakuntala, the coordinator of the webinar playing a video on knowledge. Later Manisha, a student of St. Teresa's Institute warmly introduced the resource speaker. The resource speaker started her presentation by a very beautiful quote by the former president of India Dr. A P.J.Abdul Kalam, "Creativity is seeing the same thing but thinking differently". Truly one can achieve wonders by the ability they think and express. However some researchers tend to copy the content from other people without acknowledging them which leads to unethical practices like plagiarism. Dr. Sujata while guiding us on the same said that there are several principles like trust, honesty, fairness, respect and responsibility of Academic integration which should be taken into consideration while working on a research paper. Failure to do so may result in punishment for the students and the teachers. Sujata also made us aware about the punishments for the ones who engage into plagiarism. She said that UGC has recommended punishment for the students at three different levels. The criteria differs depending upon the severity ranging from no mark or credit given to students and asking them to submit a revised script within six months to cancellation of the registered course for their acts of plagiarism.

Dr. Sujata also highlighted several ways through which one can avoid plagiarism at institute level. Exposing students to workshop on writing skills and critical thinking, sessions on how to write a research paper and research ethics are few ways through which students can avoid plagiarism. Lastly, she said, 'Lack of ideas lead to plagiarism. Get habituated to reading’, thereby encouraging all the students as well as the staff members to practice reading on daily basis.