Ensuring Ethical Tutoring Practices: Integrity in Academic Support

For many Honours students, it can become unclear as to what constitutes ethical tutoring from an external third party. And how can using external support affect your degree and your future. For students studying online, it has become evident that unethical oversight of assignments and research documents from ”tutors” and scammers alike, are rampant and easily fallen for.

As a past student myself, with the intention of pursuing higher education, it is of utmost importance that I abide by ethical frameworks that showcase external support aligned with academic institutional regulations.

This article reviews some of the top South African universities guidelines and documents pertaining to academic integrity – with references, of course.

At Perfect Psych Tutors, our main goal is to remain within these guidelines and never act as a supervisor or editor of your work. We provide conceptual guidance and feedback on clarity—not content—ensuring students remain the sole authors of their academic work. Our one-on-one lessons are focused on teaching you about research concepts, engaging with proactive learners and using all-inclusive generic templates for the research proposal and research report in order to apply and inform the students about these documents – and excel in research.

What can a tutor provide for a student in the first place?

“Tutoring is a form of academic support. It is a learning strategy - tutoring enables tutors to bridge the experiential learning gap, thereby lessening the divides between a learner’s existing knowledge and the skills and demands of a new task. It is not only an intervention for struggling students, but tutorials also provide a supportive and nurturing environment for all students“ (Faroa et al., 2025).

I see tutoring as a helping hand, especially for online students who lack consistent interactions with lecturers. To me, tutoring provides a safe space to ask silly questions and make mistakes, while learning about concepts in a stress-free environment. I make space for one’s lack of knowledge, as we all start at the bottom. I am here to help you move up the ladder of understanding to ensure you are responsible for your own academic and research success.

Academic integrity is defined by Unisa (2017, pp. 1) as “the meaningful and concerted effort to ensure concern for human dignity, honesty, trust, fairness, truthfulness, accuracy, respect and responsibility in teaching, research and community engagement”. This remains a focal point for the tutor and learner during our short courses.

Furthermore, “It is acknowledged that copyright and intellectual property is protected by statutory law and common law (Unisa, 2017, pp. 1). This means you cannot share your course instructions or assignment outline with the tutor. We will be focusing on educating you on the full scope of research and if you have specific questions that may bring clarity around your coursework, please prepare them for our discussions and apply our content into your work individually.

Abidance of ethical considerations:

1.      Plagiarism:

The University of Johannesburg (2025, pp. 2) discusses plagiarism in this context: ” A person commits “plagiarism” when they wrongly represent, pass off or reproduce someone else’s words, phrases, concepts, ideas, data or other work (“intellectual output”), whether written, visual or oral, as their own original intellectual work, without adequately acknowledging the original author or source by means of the recognised referencing methods of the relevant discipline”.

Think of plagiarism as you taking someone else’s ideas, thoughts, research or hard work and pretending that it is your own. That is dishonest and an academic offense.

As a tutor, I ensure to reference my resources throughout and at the end of each lesson and indicate which textbooks or articles I have used to create the base on my understanding of the lessons. We also ensure that you as a student, can review these resources to make your own inferences of the content.

Additionally, I strive to create unique and original lessons refined through years of tutoring experience and unravelling the research process as an individual. I am confident in the process I have created to help students achieve high results.

As a student, it is important that you do not copy paste my content as your own in your academic documents, and that our discussions remain as private content used to build your understanding of research concepts, and not to act as definitions or content in your own research documents. This is your responsibility to act ethically.

To combat plagiarism, we have one lesson in our research proposal and research report packages that focus on plagiarism and the importance of referencing. Covering the basics of APA 7^th edition referencing to build on your own research skill set.

2.      Ghost-writing

“A ghost writer is someone who writes for someone else and who is not credited as the author. Students unwilling to write their own papers can turn to academic ghostwriting services such as dissertation writing agencies” (Compilatio. 2023).

Please be aware, that we do not facilitate any ghost-writing under any circumstance. Our proof-reading services encompass grammar, spelling and sentence checks to ensure the logic of the work and argument. But we do not correct whole paragraphs or rewrite the content for students. We do not redo or rewrite hypotheses, titles or entire sections when they do not make sense. This would violate our own ethical agreements, as well as different universities expectations of their students. Therefore, it is your responsibility as a student to act ethically during our sessions to safeguard your future (University of Johannesburg, 2023).

Conclusions

We hope this overview brings you peace of mind and reassures you of our commitment to ethical tutoring. We have worked hard to research and investigate the do’s and don’ts as an external tutor for Honours degrees in South Africa. Lastly, we are open to receiving insight or critique on our processes to further ensure we do not put ourselves, our students or our reputations at risk.

At Perfect Psych Tutors, we believe ethical tutoring empowers students to become independent researchers. If you're ready to learn, grow, and uphold academic integrity, we’re here to support your journey.

Written by Josie Burnett, May 2025.

References:

1. Compilatio. (2023). Your Ultimate Guide to Academic Ghostwriting.                https://www.compilatio.net/en/blog/ghostwriting

2. Faroa, B. D., Rowe, M., Rhoda, I., & Adebiyi, B. (2025). Tutoring for success: Tutors’     experiences of a tutoring programme in a health sciences faculty. Perspective in Education – University of the Free State.

3. University of Johannesburg. (2025). Plagiarism Policy.  [Policy owner: DVC: Research and Internationalisation].

4. University of Johannesburg. (2023). CODE for ACADEMIC AND RESEARCH ETHICS.

5. University of South Africa. (2017). POLICY ON ACADEMIC INTEGRITY.

A researcher ensuring ethical practices in a psychology study.