MYP Design Academic Integrity and Citing Sources Notes

Your Own Work: What That Means in a Design Folder

1. Academic integrity means every part of your folder is either your own work or clearly marked as somebody else's.
2. Your own work covers your sketches, photographs of your own build, your test data, your annotations and your writing.
3. It still counts as yours when a teacher or technician advised you, as long as you record what they said and what you changed because of it.
4. Work shared with a partner needs the split written down, because nobody can mark either of you fairly if the folder doesn't show clearly who did what.
5. A design folder is submitted coursework, so the IB treats it exactly as it treats a written essay.

Borrowed Material Is Welcome, Unmarked Borrowing Is Not

1. Using other people's material is normal in design, and criterion A depends on it, so the rule is to credit rather than to avoid.
2. Images need crediting, including photographs of existing products pulled off a shop listing or a review site.
3. Code needs crediting, so a set of Scratch blocks, a Python function or three lines from a forum thread gets a comment saying where it came from.
4. CAD files need crediting, because a downloaded STL of a hinge is still someone else's design work after you have scaled it to 80%.
5. Templates, fonts, icon sets and sound files count as well, and many carry a licence that states what you are allowed to do with them.
6. Advice is a source too, so if the technician worked out the mitre angle for you, write that down; it costs you nothing and it is honest.

Citing: Who Made It, What It Is, Where You Found It

1. A citation is a short note beside borrowed material giving the maker, the thing itself and where it lives, so a reader could go and check it.
2. Cite at the point of use, as a caption under a figure or a bracket in the sentence, then repeat it in a reference list at the end of the folder.
3. Choose one citation style and keep it for the whole folder, because being consistent matters more than which style you picked.

What to record for each kind of source

1. For a website: the author or organisation, the page title, the site name, the full URL and the date you looked at it.
2. For a book: the author, the year, the title, the publisher and the pages you actually used.
3. For an image or product photo: the photographer or company, what the image shows, where you found it and the date.
4. When no author is given, name the organisation that published it and say that no author was listed.

AI Tools: Use Them If Allowed, Then Say So

1. If you used an AI tool at any point, record which tool, which version, the date, what you asked and what you did with the answer.
2. Keep the prompt as well as the output, since the prompt is evidence of the thinking you did.
3. AI generated images, code and text all get the same treatment as anything else you did not make yourself.
4. An AI tool is not a source for a fact, so check anything it tells you against a real page and cite that page instead.
5. Check your school's policy before you use one, because schools differ on where AI is allowed in coursework.

ChatGPT (GPT-4), 4 March 2026. Prompt: "suggest three ways to join 12 mm plywood without screws". I tested the finger joint suggestion on scrap and rejected the other two after they failed the 5 kg load test.

Work That Is Not Acknowledged: What Follows

1. Unacknowledged borrowing is treated as academic misconduct, which covers plagiarism, collusion and presenting someone else's creation as your own.
2. Plagiarism is using another person's work or ideas without credit, whether that is a paragraph, a drawing or a block of code.
3. Collusion is letting another student hand in your work as theirs, which puts both of you in the same trouble.
4. Every school has its own academic honesty policy, and the consequences usually start with redoing the work under supervision.
5. For work that goes to the IB, a suspected case is investigated by the school, and material that is not genuinely yours cannot be accepted as your evidence.
6. The safe position never changes: if you did not make it, write down who did.

Habits That Keep You Honest With No Extra Work

1. Paste the URL into the folder the moment you save an image, because finding it again a month later takes ten times as long.
2. Keep one running reference list from day one and add a line each time you use something.
3. Photograph your own work in progress, dated, so you hold clear proof of what you made and when you made it.
4. Number and caption every figure, then refer to figures by number in your writing so each source is traceable.
5. When you adapt somebody's idea, write one line on what you took and what you changed, which is also exactly what criterion B asks for.