Geoscience Honor Code

All students in the Geosciences are on their honor to do their own academic work unless directed to work jointly on a project or group activity.

Academic honesty lies at the heart of the academic enterprise.  It is the foundation for the intellectual freedom that is encouraged and shared by all members of the academic community and embodies the belief that true academic freedom and discourse can only exist within a framework of honesty, integrity, and responsibility, values essential to the life of an engaged citizenry.

Academic honesty applies to all academic work, including but not limited to examinations, quizzes, papers, and laboratory assignments. Violations of academic honesty include cheating, plagiarism, fabrication, multiple submissions, and other acts as defined below.

Cheating:

Cheating occurs when one does not do his or her own work on an academic exercise. for example, collaborating on a project that was intended to be the work of an individual student.

Plagiarism:

The appropriation of the work or ideas of another scholar--whether written or not--without acknowledgement, or the failure to correctly identify the source, constitutes plagiarism regardless of whether it is done consciously or inadvertently. A lack of knowledge of the standards of academic citation is not an excuse.

Plagiarism may take many forms. In its most blatant form, entire phrases, sentences or paragraphs are used verbatim, without quotation marks or the appropriate citation. But it is also plagiarism to paraphrase the work of another without attribution, or to take a written passage and alter a few words in an effort to make the writing one’s own.  Moreover the use of an idea of another that cannot reasonably be regarded as common knowledge is plagiarism.  Non-textual images such as drawings, graphs, and maps are also subject to plagiarism, as are the experiments, computer programs, and the web-sites of others.

Fabrication:

Fabrication occurs when a student consciously manufactures or manipulates information to support an academic exercise. Some examples of fabrication are:

Multiple Submissions:

The same work may not be submitted to more than one course without the prior approval of all instructors involved. Reasonable portions of a student’s previous work on the topic may be used, but the extent of the work must be acknowledged.

Modified from the Honor Code of Oberlin College