Plagiarism and academic integrity
Academic integrity refers to the ethical standards and honest behaviors that students are expected to uphold in their academic context.
What is academic integrity?
Academic integrity involves completing your assignments, projects, tests, and papers in a fair and honest way by acknowledging sources of information and abstaining from cheating, plagiarism, and fraud. As an essential component of any educational institution, students are expected to uphold the highest standards of academic integrity during their college studies. Upholding academic integrity ensures that everyone’s work is fairly evaluated. It fosters a learning environment where trust and fairness prevail, and it helps you build skills that are essential for your future success.
Academic integrity...
- Builds trust and credibility between students, teachers, and peers. Your teachers and classmates can rely on the fact that your work is your own.
- Ensures fairness. Each student is expected to complete their work honestly and independently, ensuring that everyone is evaluated based on their true effort. Academic misconduct gives an unfair advantage and diminishes the value of education for others.
- Fosters personal responsibility. Practicing academic integrity helps you take ownership of your work and the learning process. It develops self-reliance and responsibility and prepares you for your future.
- Creates genuine learning. When you act with academic integrity, you are genuinely engaging with the material, improving your knowledge, skills, learning and personal development.
What is academic misconduct?
Academic misconduct includes cheating, plagiarism, and fraud. The following are all considered to be instances of academic misconduct:
- Copying or attempting to copy someone else’s work
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Receiving or attempting to receive unauthorized assistance
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Using or possessing unauthorized materials, devices, or instruments that can be used to store or retrieve information
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Any unauthorized communication during examinations, tests, or quizzes, whether it is related to the task or not
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Falsifying research, data, sources, or results
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Claiming any work was submitted when it was never submitted
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Submitting work that includes material that is copied, translated, or paraphrased from any source, including purchased, published or unpublished, public or private, online or offline, analog or digital, without acknowledging the source using correct academic citation
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Submitting work that was written in whole or in part by another person or was generated in whole or in part by an artificial intelligence (AI) generative tool without explicit permission from the teacher
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Submitting work that includes material that was developed in collaboration with one or more people as if the work is solely the product of the submitting student
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Lending or sharing work that is then submitted in whole or in part by another person
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Permitting one’s work to be copied or providing access to one's work, without teacher permission, that results in copying
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Re-using one’s work in a given class for another class or in the same class without explicit permission of the teacher
Using technology responsibly
As technology, such as artificial intelligence, and its uses change and evolve, it is important to remember that questions of what is and is not acceptable in a particular assignment or context should be clarified through communication between students and teachers. Always consult with your teacher to understand what technologies you are permitted to use, and when and how their use is permitted.
Resources
- Study skills guides
- The Writing Centre
- Institutional Policy on the Evaluation of Student Achievement (IPESA) - See section 11.4 on responsibilities and consequences of academic misconduct. See section 5 on complaints and recourse mechanisms.
- Academic Misconduct Procedures
- Student Advocacy Office
- For teachers:
- Guide to Academic Integrity and Avoiding Plagiarism (pdf)
- Academic Integrity Resources (pdf)