Writing an assignment as a university student is a craft that involves not only knowledge of the topic at hand but also a general understanding of the underlying expectations and demands of scholarly production, as well as mastery of the practical skills that are required to meet and comply with these expectations and demands.
Non-compliance, whether intentional or accidental, will not only compromise your chances of successfully completing a written exam; in some particularly grave cases, it can even have profound implications for your progression in your degree or even arrest this progression altogether. Annulment of individual exams or suspension for an entire term are some of the more serious sanctions that can hold you back as you journey through university.
Essentially, it is all about building trust: Your readers need to be able to trust that the arguments that you make and the conclusions that you draw are not pulled out of thin air but rest on reliable and verifiable data, and your respondents need to be able to trust that you will treat information shared in confidence with due care and present it as accurately and loyally as humanly possible.
Not only an academic exercise
Many of the principles are actually universal in scope. You do not steal somebody else´s thoughts and ideas just like you would never steal from the supermarket shelf. You do not misrepresent or fabricate data in the same way that you do not betray a friend for the sake of expediency. Some of the principles and the skills associated with them are very specific to or particularly acute for the academic community and as such may seem both abstract and fringe for somebody new to university, who has no plans to pursue a career in research but is eager to qualify for a professional life beyond university.
However, as a CBS student, or indeed a university student anywhere, you will be trained in and are expected to perform in accordance with established academic traditions and if only for that reason a deep-seated and operational understanding of key principles and practices of academia is essential.
The fact that many of the skills that come with academic training are actually highly coveted competencies even within the business community, and indeed in life as such, makes them just that much more relevant and important.
The purpose of this guide is to make sure that you will be able to meet the requirements of academia head on and to help you steer clear of any of the pitfalls that may keep you from being the absolute best version of yourself as a CBS student.
You can either read the guide from one end to the other and in this way get a general understanding of what is at stake, or you can use the guide as a reference work and tap into individual topics whenever you come across issues that need resolving.
We hope that the guide will help you feel confident, empowered, and ready for your academic work at CBS.
Happy reading!
© Bjarke MacCarth
Joshua Kragh Bruhn - jkb.lib@cbs.dk