Academic Integrity Statement

Within that community are many smaller, specialized communities, each with its own specific conventions for working and communicating. In general, however, intellectual endeavor involves discussing the ideas that others have already expressed; striving to understand them more deeply; applying those ideas to new and far-reaching problems; and respectfully challenging those ideas and attempting to extend or even replace them in light of new discoveries.

We at Lafayette share the values of the academic community, which (among other things) require us to acknowledge the contributions that others have made and to continue to add to ongoing intellectual conversations. Failure to uphold this value, either intentionally or inadvertently, is a violation of the community’s standards. Moreover, certain violations of the community’s standards clearly rise to the level of academic dishonesty and can have serious consequences.

While not an exhaustive list, the following actions are examples of academic dishonesty:

1. Submitting work that was done by someone else and allowing your professor, classmates, or other members of the Lafayette community to believe that the work is yours is an act of academic dishonesty. This includes published or unpublished writings, words, images, computations, data, analysis, artworks, performances, videos, computer code (including open source code or code described in textbooks, blogs and discussion groups), or other products of a person’s intellectual work.
2. Incorporating, in whole or in part, someone else’s ideas, writings, words, images, computations, data, analysis, artworks, performances, videos, computer code, or other products of a person’s intellectual work into your own and allowing others to believe that you created those words, tables, images, etc., is an act of academic dishonesty.
3. Purchasing or attempting to purchase someone else’s work, or arranging to have your own academic work done in whole or  in part by someone else, with or without compensation.

4. Using unauthorized assistance on any paper, project, assignment, examination or other academic work; re-using material from previous courses without the explicit permission of the current course instructor; engaging in unauthorized collaboration with other students (including online discussion groups); copying answers from other students; accessing electronic messages or online content without the instructor’s permission; altering or misrepresenting experimental data, and programming calculators to store equations and other information; using the textbook or your instructor’s solutions, using instructors’ versions of textbooks, or using previously administered tests without the instructor’s permission.

5. Knowingly helping another student commit, or attempt to commit, academic dishonesty.

Please see Appendix II, How to Avoid Plagiarism, for helpful information/tips.

A student who is found responsible for violating the Academic Integrity Policy may receive a range of possible sanctions, including suspension or expulsion. Finally, the underlying principle is one of intellectual honesty. If a person is to have self-respect and the respect of others, all work must be his/her own.