Topic outline

  • Instructions for written assignments and plagiarism policy

    • Introduction

      The written assignment of the course are challenging. This is purposeful to get the students to think about the issues that we cover on the course. A recipe for a good answer is not to paraphrase the materials, or to hand-wave something around the topics, and then declare that everything is good in an empirical paper that was analyzed. Instead, the students are expected to explain how they understood the issues, and based on that understanding, how well the empirical paper did. This is of course difficult to do, but it will also lead to better learning outcomes than just paraphrasing the materials. Because the assignments are challenging, it is perfectly ok if a submission states that the the student did not fully understand something as long as this is accompanied by an explanation of what specifically was difficult to understand and why.

      Anonymous grading formatting requirements

      The course applies anonymous grading, which means that the instructor cannot see the students' identities in the grading system. For this to work well, there are two rules in how the submissions should be formatted:

      1. Do not include your name, student number, or any other identifying information to any submission.
      2. Do not include any information that would allow to identify your university either (course code, course name, name of the university)
      3. All submissions should be prepared with the APA article document template.

      Please see this video for an explanation of how to use the APA template in Microsoft Word:

    • H5P icon
      APA template and citing with Zotero (13:35) H5P

    • Plagiarism and citing sources

      The course has a near-zero tolerance for plagiarism and this will be enforced with the TurnItIn plagiarism detection software. While paraphrasing the material is not recommended, direct copying from the sources without proper attribution of the quote is not accepted accepted at all. When you consider quoting the material, consider the following:

      1. Are you trying to explain an idea presented in the material?
      2. Are you trying to demonstrate specifically what was said or a specific result that was reported?
      In the first case, it is better to explain the idea in your own words. In the second case, quoting the material is recommended, but the material must be clearly marked as a quote. Please see Chapter 6 Crediting Sources in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (6th edition) for details on how to do this. 

      One exception to his policy is that if a student has answered to an assignment as a part of previous attempt to do the course or as a part of the pre-requisite course TU-L0000, that old submission can be used as a starting point for a new submission for this course..

      Submissions that contain non-trivial amounts of text that has been quoted but not properly marked as quotes will lead to a score of 0 for the assignment. To get a passing grade, a student that fails due to plagiarism will need  to submit two new versions:

      1. The originally submitted  text where all copied sections are marked as direct quotes following the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (6th edition) guidelines. 
      2. A new version where the direct quotes are rephrased in your own words.

      If there are still problems in these two versions, the student is asked to correct the problems according to the above instructions and resubmit new versions. To avoid unnecessary rewriting of a submission multiple times, students that are asked to resubmit must check their work using the Independent Turnitin Originality Check before to submitting to the course website.

      This strict policy is necessary because academic writing follows certain conventions and it will be impossible to publish ones research if these conventionas are not followed. Therefore, at this point of  studies it is important to produce text yourself even when you were explaining what someone else has said. Many journals in management follow the APA referencing style, so it is useful to get to know the style early on. The style guide can be found at the library. Read through at least the rules 6.01-6.10. (in 6th edition, available in the Zotero library). Additionally, many journals (e.g. Elsevier journals) also use TurnItIn for checking submitted works, and therefore knowing how this program works can help you avoid problems in the future.


    • Turnitin Assignment 2 icon
      Resubmission of assignments with plagiarism problems Turnitin Assignment 2

    • AI text generators

      You are allowed to use AI text generators such as ChatGPT on the course. AI tools can be useful for generating ideas and to produce "first crappy drafts" of course essays and even parts of research papers. The course stance on these technologies are that they are tools similar to Grammarly and other AI-based writing aides. If a tool makes you more productive, then you should use it. 

      We have four policies on AI text generators

      1. Their use is allowed in all parts of the course. However note that if the assignment task asks you to explain how you have understood a concept, then an AI tool cannot obviously answer the question.
      2. AI text generators are not perfect and you need to critically evaluate all text that the AI generator produces (see example below)
      3. If AI text generator produces plagiarized text, this is treated as a plagiarism case where you did the plagiarism yourself.
      4. The use of AI text generators must be acknowledged. This does not not affect your grade.

      Example

      Consider the following example produced with ChatGPT

      ChatGPT exampleNote that while the answer looks good, it contains several errors. For example, it suggest that reliability implies validity, which it does not. It also claims that the book says that reliability depends on statistical techniques used to analyze the data, but the book does not say that (or at least the course staff has not been able to find that claim in the book). Moreover, when you cite a book, you should always cite chapter or preferably page numbers where in the book you can find the information that you are referring to and this is missing from the answer. Finally, the final sentence is repetitive.

      Explanation of the policy 

      Experimenting with AI text generators during the course is encouraged for three reasons. First, these tools can be genuinely useful for writing research articles. While an AI generated text is unlikely to be a useful part of a final research paper, it can be useful as a starting point or to produce ideas. Second, using these tools can be helpful in learning. As indicated by the example, AI generated text can contain error. It requires considerably more understanding of the topic to spot these errors than what it requires to simply paraphrase what the book says. As such, "generate and correct" might be a good learning strategy. Third, as a teacher or evaluator of research, you will eventually face text generated by these tools and thus it is useful to understand them.

      If you use an AI generator for any of the course assignments, you must disclose it. Whether you use a tool or not does not affect your grade and we only look at the end product. However, we require disclosure to understand how these tools might be used and how their use might support or inhibit learning. To this end, it is not sufficient to simple state that a tool was used but you should write a short paragraph (or even a few paragprahs) explaining how you used an AI tool, why did you decide to use it, and what your experiences with the tool were.

    • Unlocking model answers

      If you do not want to submit an optional assignment, but want to see the model answer for it, you can unlock the model answers using the forms below. You need to do this separately for each optional assignment.

    • Questionnaire icon
      Unlock model answer for written assignment 2 (optional) Questionnaire
    • Questionnaire icon
      Unlock model answer for written assignment 3 (optional) Questionnaire
    • Questionnaire icon
      Unlock model answer for written assignment 4 (optional) Questionnaire
    • Questionnaire icon
      Unlock model answer for written assignment 5 (optional) Questionnaire
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