Academic Integrity Declaration

To establish rules and expectations around academic integrity for the Independent Research Project (IRP), all students are required to familiarise themselves with and submit an Academic Integrity Declaration:

Warning

The Academic Integrity Declaration below is from the 2024-2025 academic year and will be updated closer to the IRP start date.

• (Imperial login required) Academic Integrity Declaration

• (Publicly accessible) Academic Integrity Declaration

This online form must be submitted twice during the IRP: once with your Project Plan and once with your Final Report and Code. The form must be submitted before the deadline for each deliverable, and submission is mandatory. It serves as your formal confirmation that you understand and agree to follow the IRP-specific academic integrity rules. By submitting the form, you confirm that you have read, understood, and have abided or will abide by all rules outlined. A deliverable will not be accepted without the academic integrity declaration and the penalty of late submission will be applied. In addition, failure to make accurate disclosures or comply with these rules and expectations may result in a formal academic misconduct investigation.

The declaration covers several critical areas, such as:

• An explicit prohibition on the use of generative AI tools in any aspect of the preparation of written reports - including drafting, rewriting, rephrasing, translating, correcting grammar or spelling, expanding content, or generating ideas or illustrations. The written reports must be entirely your own work, expressed in your own words and reasoning. By “written reports,” we mean the project plan and final report only, as described in deliverables. It is the student’s responsibility to understand whether the tools they are using constitute generative AI or not. Some examples of generative AI tools include ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Bard, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity AI, YouDao AI, Deep Seek, Scribbr, Grammarly AI, etc., but this list is not exhaustive. Writing parts of your report in non-English language and then using a generative AI tool for translation counts as “rewriting” and violates the ban on using generative AI because the English text generated is not your own. The IRP is not a test of English proficiency - minor language mistakes are acceptable as it is most important that the words you submit are entirely your own.

• A commitment to fully disclose any use of generative AI tools at any stage of the IRP - including code development, debugging, testing, planning, optimisation, documentation, packaging, learning, or research. You must clearly identify each tool used and explicitly state which parts of your work were generated or influenced by it.

• A commitment that all submitted work reflects your personal knowledge, understanding, and technical skills. Any use of resources - including websites, open-source code, examples, published articles in scientific journals, news articles, pre-prints (e.g. in arXiv or institutional repositories), books, or AI-generated suggestions - must be properly cited.

• A strict ban on outsourcing any part of the IRP to third parties. All submitted work must be your own and must not have been previously submitted for assessment (no self-plagiarism). All submitted work must be developed during the official IRP period - between the designated start and end IRP dates. You may not recycle or repurpose work completed before the IRP began, even if it was originally fully created by you. However, preliminary work carried out before the official start date may be included only if the student had already been officially allocated to the project and the work was done with the explicit approval and under the supervision of the main supervisor. Work completed independently, for other purposes, prior to the project allocation confirmation, or without oversight by the main supervisor may not be reused.

• Acknowledgement that you must be able to defend your work in a viva or authenticity interview, which may require you to explain sections of your report or code without any notes or AI assistance.

• While you are expected to receive guidance, advice, and feedback from your supervisor throughout the IRP - including, in some cases, the initial project idea or methodology - the submission, including both the written reports and the code, must reflect your own voice, reasoning, implementation, and independent understanding of the work conducted. The IRP is a supervised learning experience, but your submission should clearly demonstrate what you did, how you approached the problem, and how you interpreted and analysed the outcomes. You may have received general feedback or editorial comments on drafts of your report or code, but no one (including your supervisor, peers, or collaborators) may directly edit, rewrite, or rephrase any part of the submitted work - including code, text, figures, tables, or any other content. All elements of the submission must be your own work.

• Where the core idea, method, or starting code base was suggested or provided by someone else — such as your supervisor, a peer, or an external collaborator — and forms a substantial part of your project, this should be appropriately acknowledged in your report, for example, in the Acknowledgements section or as footnotes in appropriate places to ensure full transparency of what exactly your contributions are. It must be unambiguous from the submission what parts of the work are your own. General advice, feedback, or broad suggestions from your supervisor do not normally require explicit attribution.

The first submission of the Academic Integrity Declaration form with your Project Plan confirms your compliance with academic integrity rules and expectations up to that point in your IRP. Should any circumstances change between your Project Plan submission and Final Report submission that affect your academic integrity declaration, these changes can and must be appropriately declared when you submit the form for the second time with your Final Report.

The same Academic Integrity Declaration form (submitted twice) is used for both the Project Plan and Final Report and Code submissions. This ensures that students become familiar with the academic integrity rules and expectations early in the IRP timeline, preventing any unexpected obligations or surprises when completing the Final Report submission. Having encountered the form early (at the Project Plan stage) allows students to better prepare and understand the expectations throughout the IRP and before they sign it for the second time with their Final Report and Code.

AI Acknowledgement Statement

If you used generative AI in your IRP, you must include an AI Acknowledgement Statement in your written reports (both in your project plan and final report). This statement is usually at the beginning of the report, it is not counted towards the word limit, and should include (for each tool used):

• The tool name and version (e.g. ChatGPT‑4o)

• The publisher or provider (e.g. OpenAI, Google)

• The URL of the service

• A brief (usually one-sentence) description of how the tool was used (e.g. “used to draft Python unit-test scaffolds”)

• A statement confirming that all the submitted work is your own, despite the assistance received from generative AI tools

Please remember that using AI tools to generate any part of your written report is not allowed.

An example AI Acknowledgement statement:

“I used OpenAI’s ChatGPT‑4o (https://chat.openai.com/) to assist with debugging Python code. This generative AI tool supported my learning process, but the submitted work is my own and it reflects my own understanding and effort as I declared by signing the Academic Integrity Declaration.”