Academic integrity is a shared community value. It is built around trust and respect between members of the Occidental Community, and embodies a commitment to honesty and integrity in every aspect of one鈥檚 academic life.
All members of the Occidental community are committed to uphold the highest degree of academic integrity. Unless stipulated otherwise, the academic work done for all assignments is expected to be the student鈥檚 own, and students give proper credit to the ideas and work of others.
Our commitment to academic integrity is fundamental to being an educational community. It represents our commitment to respectfully engage with each other and with ourselves. It is essential to guarantee the open and thoughtful intellectual exchanges that provide the foundation for teaching, learning, research, and knowledge production, and as such it reflects the high value we place in the processes and products of education at 色界吧. Respecting and correctly attributing the words and ideas of all others, those in our immediate community, those with whom we work and engage with outside of Occidental, and those whose work we engage with as scholars and researchers, is essential to meaningful, thoughtful, collaboration and to advancing knowledge.
When we fail to fulfil the responsibilities that come with signing the shared commitment we harm the entire community. The open and thoughtful intellectual exchanges that provide the foundation for teaching, learning, research, and knowledge production are undermined, and the assumption of trust essential to being a community that values and pursues intellectual inquiry and knowledge production is eroded. Community members who cheat, plagiarize, fabricate, or falsify information, or assist others in these actions have failed to respect the dignity of each member of the community, including themselves, and have failed to respect the dignity and the voice of those whose ideas have been taken and represented as their own.
Signing the Academic Integrity Commitment students at matriculation and at the beginning of every semester represents a student鈥檚 affirmation to uphold the shared values of honesty and integrity, and to follow through on the responsibilities and duties outlined below. When signing the Integrity Commitment associated with work in a course, students are affirming that they have not cheated, plagiarized, fabricated, or falsified information; nor assisted others in these actions.
- All members of the community will submit original work utilizing only approved resources and appropriate attributions.
- Instructors may set parameters and expectations for ethical conduct specific to their class, and will communicate these standards on the syllabus, on assignments when necessary, and in class.
- When in doubt, students are responsible for asking instructors what guidelines should be followed for any given assignment.
- All members of the community are expected to support each other in upholding the shared value of academic integrity.
- When a student believes they may be inadvertently plagiarising when working on an assignment they should reach out to their Instructor, Writing Center, or Peer Tutor for their subject area for advice.
- Students who believe that they themselves may have violated academic integrity after turning in an assignment should promptly share this information with their instructor or the Judicial Examiner.
- Students who believe that a peer may have violated academic integrity should encourage their peer to talk with their instructor or the Judicial Examiner about the alleged violation of academic integrity.
- Students are encouraged to report peers who they have good reason to believe have violated the shared academic integrity commitment to the Judicial Examiner.