Registrar's Office

Academic Dishonesty

The University functions best when its members treat one another with honesty, fairness, respect, and trust. Students should realize that deception for individual gain is an offense against the members of the entire community. Faculty members have a responsibility to take measures to preserve and transmit the values of the academic community. To this end, they are expected to instill in their students a respect for integrity and a desire to behave honestly. They are also expected to take measures to discourage student academic dishonesty.

Examples of Academic Dishonesty

  1. Cheating: possessing unauthorized sources of information during an examination; copying the work of another student or permitting copying by another student during an exam; completing an assignment, such as an exam, paper, lab report, or computer program for another student; submitting material produced by someone else; submitting out-of-class work for an in-class assignment; altering graded work and resubmitting it for regarding; retaining exams or other materials after they were supposed to be returned to an instructor, inventing data or falsifying data.
  2. Plagiarism: taking the words or ideas of another person and either copying or paraphrasing the work without giving credit to the source (e.g., through footnotes, quotation marks, reference citations).
  3. Other forms: providing material to another person with knowledge it will be improperly used, possessing another student’s work without permission, selling or purchasing materials for class assignments, altering another student’s assignment, knowingly furnishing false or incomplete academic information, altering documents affecting student records, forging a signature or falsifying information on any official academic document.

Dealing with Instances of Academic Dishonesty

Any act of cheating or plagiarism in a course by a student will be reported to the college/school dean and the student will receive an “F” for the course.

If a student has been reported to the dean for two instances of cheating and/or plagiarism, the student will be charged with persistent academic dishonesty. The student will be given the opportunity to respond to the charge at a hearing. If the student is found guilty, the student will be suspended for one academic year. If a student is charged twice with persistent academic dishonesty and is found guilty on both occasions of academic dishonesty, the student will be indefinitely suspended from the University.