Academic Integrity Policy
WRMC

Academic Integrity

A commitment to academic integrity means that you provide and demonstrate work that is your own original ideas and content. In academic writing, we often use other sources to support our own ideas. This can be difficult to navigate for some. This is because forms of misconduct can include knowingly violating or unintentionally violating with reasonable expectation that the party should know what constitutes misconduct. Therefore, it is important that you understand what constitutes violations of academic integrity and how to avoid it.

Below are some examples of forms of violations:

Cheating assumes the use of outside people, materials, or other resources that are not your own and/or are not permitted. Therefore, unless otherwise instructed, students are expected to use their own ideas, work, and independent research for exams, projects, presentations, etc. The intentional or unintentional use of materials that are outside of the boundaries provided by the instructor or assignments is considered cheating.

Permission to collaborate on homework, assignments, projects, exams, etc. must be authorized by an instructor. When not explicitly granted permission for collaboration, student should assume that they are not permitted to collaborate. In the absence of authorization for collaboration, it is assumed that all submitted work is the result of the student’s own understanding and academic research. If submitted work is identical or overwhelmingly similar to another student’s work, particularly where individual variation would be expected, the instructor has reasonable suspicion to assume that misconduct has occurred.

Keep in mind that submission of work to a course (or even for publication) assumes that this material is new and/or full disclosure is made if the work has already been used/printed. This includes submission of assignments for multiple courses or journal. Submission of work for classes should be original work specifically for that course. This means that homework assignments and/or projects and papers are

Forgery, lying and falsifying data or other information is in direct violation of the Code of Academic Excellence. This can include, but is not limited to lying to an instructor or administrator, misuse of copyrighted information, purchasing, fabricating or falsifying results in order to achieve undue academic advantage and misuse of or theft of documents.

Any student who aids in misconduct for another or attempts to intimidate another student would be assumed in violation of the Code of Academic Excellence. This would include, but is not limited to, providing whole or partial work to another student who did not participate in and/or do the work, in reasonable assumption that the information would be used in a manner consistent with misconduct. Attempting to cheat before the misconduct is discovered even if no cheating ultimately occurs. Intimidation, including threats and/or physical intimidation in order to take or misuse materials from another student are forms of misconduct.

Hacking into accounts or stealing work from another used to achieve an undue academic advantage is considered to be a violation of the Code of Academic Excellence. This includes unauthorized access to a computer, email account, portal, or other form of storage by an individual with the intent of stealing or copying another’s work.

Intentionally harming, deleting, or altering the work of others to gain an undue advantage are acts that are considered to be inappropriate for scholars. These sorts of actions undermine the work of others and create an environment where the work of others is not valued. It is expected that scholars respect the work of others and not attempt to harm or destroy this work.

Plagiarism includes, but is not limited to, the intentional or unintentional use of the ideas of others without properly attributing them to the original owner/thinker. This even includes personal reusing your own ideas without properly citing them.