Prof. Pavlac's Policy on Academic Honesty

The purpose of educational requirements like exams and papers is to build student skills through their hard work, and provide an opportunity for evaluation and comparison of student performance. Using improper methods or stealing from the works of others defeat these goals. Cheating is also morally and ethically wrong: it violates the intellectual property rights of knowledge producers, and it treats other honest students unfairly.  

In order to maintain academic integrity I have created the following guidelines.

Cheating on exams is a serious breach of expected academic honesty. You cheat when, instead of learning the information on your own, you use improper means in taking exams.
Cheating takes many forms, including but not limited to:

• obtaining or attempting to obtain a copy of the exam in advance of the test period.
• using practice answers written outside of class during the exam.
• copying from another student's paper during the exam, or allowing another student to copy from yours.
• asking a student from a previous section about the exam before you yourself take it in your section.
• using notes, books, any printed or electronic material during the exam (unless given express permission, such as for on-line courses or WebCT assignments).
• committing plagiarism (see below).

To help prevent cheating during exams, books and bags should be removed from easy sight, no recording or playing machines may be used. Only paper from the instructor is to be used. Please write legibly, in dark blue or black ink.

Plagiarism is a form of cheating usually done on written assignments, where a writer uses other people's information without proper credit. Actually, other people's information may be readily appropriated in other media environments.  "Fair use" allowed in some forms of writing (including this page), but might not be allowed in our classroom. Usually, in our academic setting, information sources must be properly credited.   You should be aware of what constitutes plagiarism and how to avoid it.  For more information and links to sites about plagiarism go to information literacy, and read the guide "Help stop plagiarism!" 

The most common form of plagiarism these days is to "cut and paste:" namely a plagiarizer would copy words from some website or book and use them in an essay as if the words were her own.  To do this is a violation of academic integrity.  The proper thing to do when using a source is to rewrite the information in your own words AND cite the source. 

Plagiarism takes many forms, including but not limited to:

• using a written assignment done by another person (this includes hiring or paying someone to do all or part of a written assignment for you (a form of ghostwriting), stealing a paper from another student, or contracting with a paper mill or paper writing service).
• making up fake sources.
• intentionally misleading by attributing information to an incorrect or fake source.
• copying and using any material from another student or source without proper quotations AND citations -- more than 3 words of another person's source is usually too many without marking it as a quote (by placing quotation marks or formatting as single-spaced and indented if longer than 3 lines--see citation.html).
• quoting without providing a source citation.
• insufficiently paraphrasing someone else's words, whether cited or not.
• paraphrasing someone else's unique ideas, statistics or other information without acknowledgement or attribution through citations (whether they have given their permission or not).
  For more on citations, see the Corgan Library Study Guide #11 and paper presentation guide.

NOTE: Having other people read your unfinished paper and make suggestions is not plagiarism, but rather should be encouraged as part of the writing process. Do use the Writing Center!

Penalties
If the instructor determines significant cheating has taken place on an exam, a student will earn no (zero) credit for that exam.  If the instructor determines significant plagiarism has been done on a written assignment, a student will earn no (zero) credit for that assignment.  A student cheating more than once, whether on written assignments or exams, may fail the course.  

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URL: http://departments.kings.edu/history/honesty.html Site built, maintained & Copyright © MMVI by Brian A. Pavlac: All Rights Reserved. Last Revision: 16 December 2006