Academic Integrity
As a Christ-centered intentional community, everything we do and say reflects our identity in Christ and our position as a part of this community; thus, integrity in all areas of life is critical to our own spiritual life and is equally critical to the life of the Taylor community.
Academic dishonesty constitutes a serious violation of academic integrity and scholarship standards at Taylor that can result in substantial penalties, at the sole discretion of the University, including but not limited to, denial of credit in a course as well as dismissal from the University. Any act that involves misrepresentation regarding the student's academic work or that abridges the rights of other students to fair academic competition is forbidden. Academic dishonesty includes, but is not limited to, cheating on assignments or exams, plagiarizing, submitting the same (or substantially the same) paper in more than one course without prior consent of all instructors concerned, depriving others of necessary academic sources, sabotaging another student's work, and using without attribution a computer algorithm or program.
In short, a student violates academic integrity when he or she claims credit for any work not his or her own (words, ideas, answers, data, program codes, music, etc.) or when a student misrepresents any academic performance. All major acts of academic dishonesty, as defined herein, must be reported by the faculty member to the Office of Academic Affairs and the Office of Student Development. Departments and/or professors may have discipline- or course-specific policies.
Plagiarism
Definition: In an instructional setting, plagiarism occurs when a person presents or turns in work that includes someone else's ideas, language, or other (not common-knowledge)1 material without giving appropriate credit to the source.2
Taylor distinguishes between major and minor plagiarism infractions. Examples of minor infractions include inappropriate or inadequate citing or not crediting ideas from class readings. Examples of major infractions include taking significant portions of text from any source with no attribution or having a peer help write the paper. Taylor also distinguishes between collaboration, writer's feedback and plagiarism. Collaboration and getting feedback on one's own writing are essential parts of the writing process; however, having a text altered for the writer is not. The level of appropriate collaboration on individual writing assignments is up to each professor; and each professor should make it clear to his or her students what level of collaboration is appropriate for each writing assignment (i.e. brainstorming with other classmates for ideas). Writer's feedback means having a peer or a Writing Center tutor work with the student to provide suggestions for revision in ways that allow the student author to maintain ownership; this is not plagiarism. However, having a peer make changes to the organization, ideas, paragraphs or sentences for the student demonstrates a level of ownership over the work; thus, these acts would be considered plagiarism.
Plagiarism Policy: All major acts of plagiarism must be reported by the faculty member to the Offices of Academic Affairs and Student Development. The student and faculty member involved will receive a copy of the completed plagiarism incident report. All incident reports will be archived in both Academic Affairs and Student Development and will be viewed and used solely by the deans of these offices to track plagiarism incidents in order to catch patterns of behavior. This tracking will affect student consequences for any additional plagiarism incidents reported and may affect recommendations for off-campus student activity participation. Plagiarism records in the Offices of Academic Affairs and Student Development will be destroyed along with all other student records according to their respective policies.
1 Common knowledge means any knowledge or facts that could be found in multiple places or as defined by a discipline, department or faculty member.
2 Adapted from the Writing Program Administrators' "Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The WPA Statement on Best Practices."
