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Violations of Academic Integrity

Academic integrity can flourish only when members of the University voluntarily govern their personal behavior by high ethical standards. However, it is also crucial for the University to define the boundaries of ethical behavior and to prohibit attacks on the principles of academic integrity. Policies that govern faculty members’ ethical responsibilities are treated in the Faculty Handbook. Students’ ethical responsibilities are governed by the policy stated here. Departments and programs at the University may supplement this policy with additional guidelines and faculty members may specify additional guidelines in the syllabi for their classes. Students must adhere to such guidelines as well as to university-wide policy.

All Sacred Heart University students in all degree programs are prohibited from engaging in the following types of behavior:

Cheating

Forms of cheating include but are not limited to:

• Having unpermitted notes during any exam or quiz. Only materials that a professor explicitly instructs students that they may use during an examination are permitted.
• Copying from other students during any exam or quiz.
• Having unpermitted prior knowledge of any exam or quiz.
• Copying or rewriting any homework or lab assignment from another student or borrowing information for such assignments with the intention of presenting that work as one’s own.
• Using unpermitted materials or taking information from other students for a take-home exam. A take-home exam is an exam; therefore, it requires independent work.  Students should follow the procedures given by the professor.

Note: These standards require independent work by a student, except for those contexts where professors have specified forms of permitted collaboration with other students or with external sources, such as artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots. If no form of collaboration has been specified, students must assume that none is permitted. Because assignments that involve group-based work can cause students to question what forms of collaboration are proper, they should seek guidance from their professors in all cases of doubt. Professors should make clear to students what forms of collaboration are permissible and impermissible. The standards on cheating do not prohibit students from studying together or from tutoring each other.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is any act of misrepresenting the sources of one’s information and ideas. When authoring essays, it is the act of presenting another person’s or AI-generated written words or ideas as one’s own. When reporting experimental work, it includes the acts of falsifying data and presenting another’s data as one’s own. In speeches, it involves quoting passages of others’ speeches or written words without mention of the author. Plagiarism is also possible in art and music if one makes use of a work of art or music in a way that violates the standards of attribution in those fields or is AI-generated when use of AI is prohibited by the professor.

Plagiarism may be willful, as when a student knowingly copies a source without attribution, or negligent, as when a student fails to cite sources properly. Both willful and negligent instances of plagiarism are subject to penalty—in part because professors must judge the result of a student’s work, not his or her intentions, and in part because students are expected to know and follow the standards for proper citation of sources.

Forms of plagiarism therefore include but are not limited to:

• Copying whole papers or passages from another student or from any source.
• Allowing another student to copy or submit one’s work. Buying or obtaining a paper from any source, including term-paper sellers and Internet sources, and submitting that paper or passages of it as one’s own work.
• Using artificial intelligence (AI) to generate written responses or ideas when not explicitly allowed by the instructor and submitting that content as one’s own work.
• Pasting a passage from the Internet or any computer source into one’s paper without quoting and attributing the passage.
• Fabricating or falsifying a bibliography.
• Falsifying one’s results in scientific experiments, whether through fabrication or copying them from another source.
• Appropriating another person’s computer programming work for submission as an assignment.
• When creating a webpage, film, or musical composition as a course assignment, failing to attribute material that comes from other media or failing to obtain proper permission for the use of such material.
• Any other appropriation of another’s intellectual property without proper attribution.
• Submitting an assignment that one wrote during a previous semester or submitting the same assignment for more than one class simultaneously. This action includes reusing substantial portions of previously written work for a current assignment. (Students who are unsure of what work of their own they may use in preparing an assignment should consult their professors.) Assignments must be written the semester in which they are assigned unless a professor approves of the use of previously written material with specific guidelines. Assignments may only be submitted for credit in a single course unless professors in multiple courses are informed of and approve of the multiple submissions.

Note: Improper citation of sources occurs when a student presents all sources used in preparing a paper but fails to attribute quotations and information from those sources in the paper's body. Specific examples include:

• Failure to use quotation marks for direct quotes or for an author’s distinctive phrases. (A rule of thumb to follow is that five or more words in succession from a source must be enclosed in quotation marks.)
• Following an author’s structure of writing and ideas but rephrasing the sentences partially to give the impression that the whole passage reflects the student’s structure and ideas. This includes text generated by artificial intelligence, unless explicitly allowed by the instructor.
• Failure to give page numbers for quotations or for other information that did not originate with the student.

The above examples may also be considered plagiarism. Because they sometimes do not involve willful misrepresentation, professors may have more lenient policies in dealing with them. Yet students should strive to cite all information properly and should note that professors have the discretion to treat these cases as seriously as the forms of plagiarism listed above.