Academic honesty and integrity means that all academic work is the legitimate, truthful work of the student. Cheating and plagiarism are choices that destroy academic excellence. It is the student’s personal responsibility to submit tests, essays, projects and homework that are free of fraud and deception. Honest, ethical behavior is an essential component of the learning process.
Instances of academically dishonest behaviors include, but are not limited to:
- Submitting a paper or project that is not the student’s work
- Communicating with another student during an exam or quiz when such communication, including cell phone use, is reasonably suspicious
- Copying during an exam or quiz
- Allowing another student to copy from one’s exam or quiz
- Using unauthorized notes or devices, including online translators
- Copying another student’s assignment
- Allowing another student to copy one’s assignment
- Any intentional falsification or invention of data citation or other authority in an academic exercise
- Unauthorized collaboration
- Copying from a print or online source without providing proper citation
- Paraphrasing from a print or online source without providing proper citation
- Failing to cite with quotation marks the words, written or spoken, of another
- Presenting another person’s creative work or ideas as one’s own in essays, poems, music, art, computer programs, visuals, or other projects
To help students avoid plagiarism in the writing process teachers will provide:
- An assignment sheet with explicit requirements and directions
- A specific rubric for assessment of the process and product
- Checkpoints to facilitate the research process to assist students in time management and to provide opportunities to help students during the process
- Availability for students who are having difficulty with note taking, documenting, or formatting procedures
- Clear guidelines for acceptable help from peers, faculty, and parents
To help students avoid plagiarism in the research process Librarians will provide:
- Information on various types of resources
- Information on giving credit whenever you use:
- another person’s idea, opinion, or theory;
- any facts, statistics, graphs, drawings–any pieces of information–that are not common knowledge;
- quotations of another person’s actual spoken or written words; or
- paraphrase of another person’s spoken or written words
- Information on citing sources (see LIBGUIDE: CITING SOURCES)
- Assist in the use of Turn-it-in.com (used school wide)