Academic Honesty

In your college courses, it’s expected that you (and only you) will do the assigned work. By completing the assignments, papers, quizzes, and exams, you are showing that you have mastered the content of the course - meaning you have learned the information and gained the skills covered in that class. (Your grade shows how well you’ve done that.)

When you are dishonest in your academic work, either by cheating or plagiarizing another person’s work, the learning process breaks down.

Cheating

Cheating is dishonestly trying to get credit for academic work and can include:

  • Submitting work that is not your own (example: downloading a paper from the Internet)
  • Submitting work you previously completed for another course
  • Cheating during a quiz or exam, or
  • Allowing another student to copy or plagiarize your work.

Cheating is intentional and a serious act, which can have major consequences. We’ll get into those consequences a little later. For now, just know that cheating harms your chances for academic success and jeopardizes the trust placed in you by peers and teachers.

Plagiarism

"Plagiarism means representing the words, creative work, or ideas of another person as one’s own without providing proper documentation of source.
Examples include, but are not limited to:
  • copying information word for word from a source without using quotation marks and giving proper acknowledgement by way of footnote, endnote, or in-text citation;
  • representing the words, ideas, or data of another person as one’s own without providing proper attribution to the author through quotation, reference, in-text citation, or footnote;
  • producing, without proper attribution, any form of work originated by another person such as a musical phrase, a proof, a speech, an image, experimental data, laboratory report, graphic design, or computer code;
  • paraphrasing, without sufficient acknowledgment, ideas taken from another person that the reader might reasonably mistake as the author’s; and
  • borrowing various words, ideas, phrases, or data from original sources and blending them with one’s own without acknowledging the sources."  [University of Minnesota Student Conduct Code]

Plagiarism can be intentional, meaning you knowingly copied the words of another person in your paper. Or it can be unintentional, meaning you weren’t trying to pass off someone else’s ideas as your own, but you didn’t properly cite your sources. Unintentional plagiarism often happens when students don’t know citation rules, fail to keep track of their research, or are rushing and/or disorganized when completing an assignment.