Academic Misconduct Policy
At Central Connecticut State University we value personal integrity as fundamental to our interactions with each other. We believe that one of the purposes of a University education is for students to learn to think critically, to develop evaluative skills, and to express their own opinions and voices. We place special weight on academic honesty in all of our intellectual pursuits because it is a value that is fundamental to academic life and scholarly practice. All members of the University community are obligated to uphold high standards of academic honesty in their scholarship and learning. Therefore, we expect students to take personal responsibility for their intellectual work and to respect and acknowledge the ideas of others. Academic honesty means doing one's own work and giving proper credit to others whose work and thought one may draw upon. It is the responsibility of each student to become familiar with what constitutes academic dishonesty and plagiarism and to avoid all forms of cheating and plagiarism.
The CSU code of conduct, Guidelines for Student Rights and Responsibilities and Judicial Procedures, defines academic misconduct as including, but "...not limited to providing or receiving assistance in a manner not authorized by the instructor in the creation of work to be submitted for academic evaluation including papers, projects, and examinations (cheating); and presenting, as one's own, the ideas or words of another person or persons for academic evaluation without proper acknowledgement (plagiarism)."
Cheating may take many forms. It includes, but is not limited to, the following actions, unless explicitly authorized by the instructor:
Exams
- Copying from another person's paper or receiving unauthorized aid from another person during an examination;
- Use of unauthorized materials or devices during an examination or any other form of academic evaluation and grading; e.g., use of signals, notes, books, or calculators during an examination when the instructor has not approved their use;
- Knowingly allowing another person to copy from one's paper during an examination.
Improper Behavior
- Use of another person as a substitute in any form of academic evaluation or acting as a substitute for another person in any form of academic evaluation; e.g., a student cannot have another person take an examination for him/her;
- Acquisition or distribution of improperly acquired examinations; e.g., stealing examinations before the test period or taking a copy of an examination from a testing room without the permission of the instructor (examinations which have been distributed by an instructor are legitimate study tools);
- Submission of another's material as one's own for academic evaluation;
- Preparation of work for another student to submit for academic evaluation;
- Unauthorized collaboration in the preparation of materials to be submitted for academic evaluation; e.g., working with another student on an assignment when the instructor has not authorized working together;
- Submission of the same work, or substantially similar work, in more than one course without prior consent of the evaluating instructor(s);
- Disruption in classroom, lab, or research and study areas; any conduct or actions that grossly or persistently interferes with the academic process. (See the CSU, Rights and Responsibilities, "Proscribed Conduct," No. 7, CCSU Student Handbook.)
Falsification or Misuse of Academic Information
- Falsification or misrepresentation of one's own academic record or that of anyone else; e.g., altering a transcript for admission, hacking into the University's computer system and changing a grade, having another student take an examination in one's place, signing someone else's name to an attendance sheet.
- Unauthorized use of information in University computer records or the computer files of other students (see Computer Use Policy);
- Using unauthorized materials or fabricated data in an academic exercise; e.g., falsifying data in a research paper or laboratory activity; conducting research on human or animal subjects without review by the appropriate panel or supervisor.
Plagiarism
- Copying sentences, phrases, paragraphs, tables, figures, or data directly or in slightly modified form from a book, article, or other academic source without using quotation marks or giving proper acknowledgment to the original author or source.
- Copying information from Internet Web sites and submitting it as one's own work;
- Buying papers for the purpose of turning them in as one's own work;
- Selling or lending of papers for the purpose of violating academic honesty policies. (This may also be an academic crime, see Connecticut General Statutes, §53-392a.)
Understanding Plagiarism
Plagiarism is presenting another person's work without acknowledgements, whether in the same or in slightly modified form. In academic practice this is regarded as theft, intended to gain undeserved credit. Like other forms of academic dishonesty, plagiarism is cheating. To academicians, a well-documented paper is more impressive than one that arouses the suspicion of a reader familiar with the student's work and alert to echoes from other writers. The proper use of outside sources does not necessarily mean that a paper is lacking in originality, nor does the presence of quotation marks in the text. In fact, the purpose of research and documentation is to share useful information with the reader. The penalties for plagiarism greatly exceed the unlikely reward of gaining credit by getting away with it.
Students must be careful to avoid plagiarism and are responsible for learning how to present the ideas of others in their own work. For current documentation practice, consult the instructor and a style manual. When material is borrowed from another person, the source must be indicated. There are three ways in which another writer's material may appear:
- By putting quotation marks around short passages borrowed verbatim (word for word); or by setting off from the text, without quotation marks, for longer quotations.
- By précis; condensing part of a writer's argument.
- By paraphrase: interpretation of a writer's ideas. All three must be acknowledged either in footnotes or informally in the text.