What is Academic Integrity?

Academic integrity requires that all academic work submitted by a student is wholly the product of the student.  Combined efforts of students are only acceptable when explicitly assigned.   Students must assume responsibility for maintaining honesty in all work for credit and are expected to report incidents of academic dishonesty that they witness.

Examples of violations to academic integrity include:

Cheating

Cheating means getting unauthorized help on an assignment, quiz, or exam.    A student who cheats misrepresents his or her mastery of the material on a test, written assignment or project.

Examples of cheating:

1. Copying another student’s homework
2. Allowing someone to copy your homework
3. Using restricted books, notes, cheat sheets, calculators etc. during a test
4. Giving out test questions or answers after you have taken a test to someone who is yet to take the test
5. Using text messaging and/or camera phones to send or copy test questions and answers to share with other students (This should be impossible since cell phones and electronic equipment are not to be used during the school day.)
6. Putting your name on and turning in an assignment or test completed by another
7. Taking or receiving answers to test questions during a testing session
8.  Making it easy for someone to take answers from your test during a testing session.

 Plagiarism

Plagiarism means submitting work as your own that is someone else’s.  When a student submits work that includes research the sources of the information must be cited.

 Examples of plagiarism:

1. Not citing as a quote exact words from an author
2. Not giving appropriate credit to passages that you reword or paraphrase from another author
3. Purchasing a term paper
4. Turning in a paper written by someone else
5. Using language translators inappropriately to produce papers in modern language classes
6. Using Spark Notes, Pink Monkey, etc. to totally replace the actual reading of assigned novels.

Fabrication

Fabrication is the inventing or embellishing of any information or the giving of false information in an educational assignment.

Examples of fabrication:

1. Making up results or statistics that are not true to support your argument
2. Padding your bibliography with sources you really didn’t use.

Stealing or being in the possession of tests, answers keys, or gradebooks.

Cited articles:

http://teaching.berkeley.edu/bgd/prevent.html

http://ctaar.rutgers.edu/integrity/policy.html

http://www.collegepubs.com/ref/10PrinAcaInteg.shtml