Academic Honesty

EXPECTATIONS ACADEMIC HONESTY POLICY 

What is Academic Integrity/Honesty?

Academic integrity involves

  • Acting with integrity and honesty by producing your own authentic work
  • Avoiding any behavior that gains one student an unfair advantage and negatively impacts the results of other students
  • Following the rules for all examinations as set out by a teacher, a specific department, the school administration or any other organization for which examinations are given within on behalf of Seaquam

Examples of academic integrity

  • Acknowledging as honestly and accurately as possible the ideas and work of others, even when the source cannot be stated with absolute accuracy
  • It is alright for students to work collaboratively or supportively
  • collaboration can occur when students discuss ideas for a paper or brainstorm sources that they might use to research a common idea
  • collaboration can also occur when students are assigned to work on a group project in which the individual roles are decided upon or defined by the group or teacher

Examples of academic misconduct

  • Using the ideas of another person within your work without citing the source from which those ideas were gained (plagiarism)
  • Copying or paraphrasing from websites, books, journals, essays or any other source without citing the source of origin of the information (plagiarism)
  • The use of photographs, graphs, data or computer programs without citing the source from which the information is taken (plagiarism)
  • Allowing your work to be copied or reproduced in some fashion by another person (collusion), including copying off others’ tests or allowing another to copy your test
  • Handing in work completed by another person and taking credit for it (collusion)
  • Missing class to gain additional preparation time (eg. for tests) or falsifying an excuse, in any fashion, for an absence
  • Turning in the same work for more than one assessed component of a given class, or turning in the same work for assessment in two different classes.
  • Copying and pasting from Chat GPT or other artificial intelligence agents OR using content from an artificial intelligence search without sourcing it

 Avoiding Academic misconduct

  • Teachers must make students aware of what constitutes academic dishonesty and establish expectations for academic honesty in their classrooms
  • Teachers will model examples of academic honesty in the classroom (eg. citing/referencing sources for information used in class)
  • Students must cite all sources for ideas, notes, quotations, visuals, etc, in footnotes and/or a formal bibliography as required by each assignment
  • As requested by individual IB subject teachers for IB courses, students will submit assignments to turnitin.com to screen for possibilities of plagiarized information.
  • Teachers are expected to confirm, to the best of their ability, that students have submitted authentic work for assessment
  • Students are expected to treat each assessment opportunity seriously and take the time and initiative to complete original work for each assessment in each course.

Consequences for Academic misconduct

When a student engages in academic dishonesty, SOME or ALL of the following consequences will apply:

  • A mark of zero on the assignment that involves examples of academic dishonesty
  • Notification of the parents that an academic dishonesty offence has occurred so that such behavior can be more closely monitored in the future
  • Notification and/or referral to the appropriate administrative officer (by grade assignment)