Over the past decade or so, plagiarism has become an ever increasing issue within the university environment. Both students and staff are required to show work that represents their own efforts and to reflect the outcomes of their learning. However, with the advent of the Internet and easy access to almost limitless written material on every conceivable topic, suspicion of plagiarism is rife. As a consequence learning and teaching is affected with valuable time being diverted from encouraging and developing students’ writing, reading, and critical thinking abilities to becoming ‘writing police’ to track attempts to pass off work that deliberately uses someone else’s work, language, ideas or other original material that is not acknowledged.
Therefore the primary focus of this assessment piece is to encourage students to:
(1) Develop an appropriate research question/topic (any topic of interest – some will be provided)
(2) Search appropriate literature from academic/scientific databases
(3) Export the literature into a bibliographic software package (Endnote)
(4) Utilise Endnote to assist with appropriate in-text referencing (APA, Harvard, other) and reference list
(5) Critically analyse the information and provide a 200 word written and referenced summary
For this assessment piece you should aim to locate and use relevant primary source material published within the last couple of years to use within your 200 word summary. Your essay should provide a very brief introductory overview of what the key issue is, focussing on two important aspects of the issue that you have chosen whilst considering their value and drawbacks. The essay should be completed with a final concluding statement. In this assessment, you should aim to make use of recent primary scientific journal articles and case reports, to make your work as up-to-date as possible and to obtain the best possible mark. A video presentation on this assessment task will be available on the Moodle site for this course, to give you further support.
Please note the following details:
• As a guideline, the length of your essay should be around 200 words or so, excluding references – essays that are substantially longer than this (say over 350 words) or shorter than this (say less than 50 words) are unlikely to score as highly as those that make the best use of the 200 word length (being on-target and making the best use of the word allocation is always better than being off-message).