Academic Dishonesty Defined
Antioch College values academic honesty by all members of the community. At Antioch College, all forms of cheating, plagiarism, and fabrication are considered academic fraud. Cheating occurs when students do not do their own work in an academic exercise or assignment. Plagiarism occurs when students appropriate the work or ideas of another without acknowledgement, or fail to correctly identify the source, whether it is done consciously or inadvertently. Examples include, but are not limited to, the following actions:
• Presenting and paraphrasing information and ideas from sources without credit to the source;
• Use of direct quotations without quotation marks and without credit to the source.
• Failure to provide adequate citations for material obtained through electronic research;
• Downloading and submitting work from electronic databases or websites as your own work or without citing sources;
• Participation in a group project that presents plagiarized materials;
• Submitting material created/written by someone else as your own, including purchased term/research papers, art, music, performance, etc;
• Copying from another student’s examination;
• Allowing a student to copy from another student’s examination;
• Using outside materials on an examination, assignment, etc. that are not authorized for use during the examination, assignment, etc;
• Collaborating on a project that was intended to be completed individually;
• Preparing or obtaining notes to take into a closed-book examination, for example, writing on the hand or desk, preparing a crib sheet, or storing information in any other format for use and retrieval during the examination;
• Using written notes or information, or electronic devices, such as a laptop computer, phone, or calculator in an unauthorized manner to store, share, and/or retrieve information during an examination;
• Falsifying citations, for example by citing information from a nonexistent reference;
• Listing sources in the bibliography that were not used in the academic exercise;
• Engaging another individual (whether a part of the College community or from outside of the College community) to complete the student’s examination, to complete the student’s academic exercise, or to write the student’s paper;
• Self-Plagiarism, or “recycling” work, in which previously written or published work is presented as newly written;
• Duplicate submissions (submitting one assignment to two different courses without specific permission of both instructors), at any point during your academic career, regardless of when the work was created.
Defining “Common Knowledge”
Information that is found consistently in multiple sources (such as reference books or textbooks), is easily accessible, and is known to be true by a wide audience is generally assumed to be common knowledge and would not need to be documented. Information from sources not readily available to most people, which concentrates on a specific field or subject area, and contains jargon not commonly used and specific to a discipline or field of study, should be documented. Students who are unsure whether or not specific information is considered to be common knowledge should consult their course instructor to avoid plagiarism. In general, students’ work must be their own. Violations of academic honesty are taken very seriously. Penalties for violations range from failing assignments or tests to dismissal from the College. These acts violate the Antioch College Honor Code and damage trust in one another. Community members, who witness or suspect violations of academic integrity, should report the suspected offender to the instructor.