Being a student at Tilburg University, you are now part of the academic community. With that role comes the responsibility to protect another’s work and abide by the rules of conduct that the academic community has agreed upon. Notably, academic research is an accumulative and collaborative undertaking. In creating your own work, you will often be building upon the work of others that has been done in the past. Whilst doing so is an indispensable part of academic research, this does not mean that you are permitted to copy-paste text from others (be they academics or peers) or yourself without acknowledging their work. Doing academic research entails integrating the knowledge and insights of others into your own work by translating them into your own words, or making it crystal clear that you are using the work of others to make your own. It is important to acknowledge the work and insights of others. The method by which you must do so is known as referencing.

 

At any point that you base your writing on the work of others, a reference to said work MUST be included. Neglecting to acknowledge that some part of your work is based on the work of others entails that you are presenting it as though it were your own. This is known as plagiarism. Whether plagiarism is performed on purpose or by accident, it is taken as a very serious offence in the academic world as it undermines the rules of conduct in the academic community.

 

Similar to the rest of the academic world, Tilburg University takes plagiarism very seriously. Committing plagiarism may have serious negative consequences. Lecturers are obliged to present suspicions of plagiarism to the Board of Examiners. Should suspicions of plagiarism be proven after investigation, the work in which plagiarism was performed will be deemed invalid. If a grade would be attached to this work, it will be an automatic zero. Committing plagiarism will also result in a note in your student file, and repeated offences may result in further consequences or even expulsion. The following are considered examples of plagiarism:

• Using information from a source without including a reference to said source.

• Referencing to sources that you did not actually use in your writing.

• Passing off a piece of work that is party or wholly made by another, as your own.

• ‘Recycling’ a piece of your own work that you previously used elsewhere (‘self-plagiarism’)

 

The practice of referencing is employed to avoid committing plagiarism. It consists of two parts; in-text referencing and the creation of a reference list. Depending on which style of referencing you employ, references will take a different shape. The ACRES Quick-Start Guide focuses on APA Style (commonly found in the social sciences) and Chicago Style (commonly found in the humanities). As APA Style is the most commonly used referencing style at Tilburg University and in academia in general, it is the recommended choice of referencing style for most of your academic work.

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Before we turn to discussing referencing in more detail below, first a note on a different plagiarism-related practice; the use of artificial intelligence (AI) models in assignment creation. AI models such as ChatGPT have been developed to the extent that today they can generate decent-looking paragraphs or chapters for essays or assignments. Students may be tempted to use such AI models in order to save themselves time and effort, or meet a deadline which they think they otherwise wouldn’t reach.

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Using AI models such as ChatGPT in writing assignments is explicitly forbidden. It is vital for the validity of your produced work that it is wholly your own. Using AI models damages the learning gains you obtain from your studies at Tilburg University and deprecates the value of your ECTS and diploma. Lecturers at Tilburg University are in possession of guidelines and models that allow for the detection of AI model use in students’ submitted work. If a student is suspected of using AI in their work, they will be invited to a meeting to determine whether AI is actually in play. During this meeting, the student may be asked to reproduce the information or analysis they submitted verbally, to be asked about the methodology and the writing process, etc.

 

It should be noted that lecturers do not have to prove the use of AI. If after the abovementioned meeting the suspicion of AI being used hasn’t been lifted, then the student’s verbal representation of their work during the meeting may be assessed as the deliverable instead. If this verbally expressed understanding does not align with the text they have submitted – which will be extremely likely in case an AI model was indeed used – then students may obtain either a lower grade or a fail.