Getting in early: transparency in undergraduate dissertations
Given QAA’s 2017 report on contract cheating, third party services and essay mills (PDF), providing early guidance for students on the importance of academic rigor and integrity is vital.
At RMF 18, we launched a new Resource Pack, entitled lebanon rcs data Dissertations and their Data: at lecturers or tutors responsible for running undergraduate dissertation support classes.
The pack was developed by Haaker and colleagues for a session created for an undergraduate sociology module at the University of Essex, called Thinking Ahead, helping third years prepare for their dissertations. The teaching builds on the programme of capacity building work done by the UK Data Service, seeking to apply core principles of excellence in data management, description and sharing to the classroom. The dissertation may be the student’s first encounter with data collection or data management, so encouraging students to think about some of the practicalities of their data collection, and how they can demonstrate rigorous and transparent research, at this early stage are useful.