Avoiding Plagiarism

ACADEMIC DISHONESTY

POLICY STATEMENT

Cal Maritime functions best when its community members treat one another with honesty, respect, and trust. Because the quality of our graduates depends on the ethics they display, faculty members are expected to act promptly on suspected cases of academic dishonesty. The following policy is controlled by the California Code of Regulations Title 5 § 41301.

ACADEMIC DISHONESTY

Cheating and academic dishonesty include all student behaviors intended to gain unearned academic advantage or to interfere with another’s academics by fraudulent or deceptive means.

Examples of inappropriate student conduct that can lead to the imposition of sanctions include, but are not limited to, the following (see Academic Senate Policy #547 Inappropriate Academic Conduct):

Taking Information

• copying graded homework assignments from another person
• unauthorized collaborative efforts on take home exams or graded homework
• looking at another student’s paper during an examination
• unauthorized use of text materials or notes during an examination.

Providing Information

• giving one’s work to another to be copied, paraphrased, or plagiarized
• giving answers to another student during an examination
• after having taken an examination, passing information concerning the examination on to students who still must take it
• providing a required writing assignment for another student
• taking an exam, writing a paper, or doing a project for another student

Plagiarizing

• unauthorized copying of all or parts of an article, paper, book, published work, or other proprietary source, including documents from the internet, and submitting all or parts of the article or paper as one’s own work, without proper citations or attribution
• submitting a paper acquired from a research or term paper service
• failing to give credit for ideas, statements of fact, or conclusions derived by another author
• failure to use quotation marks when quoting directly from another source, whether it is a paragraph, a sentence, or part thereof (except in some informal writing assignments, such as reading responses or reader’s logs/journals, when the instructor has specified different guidelines)
• retyping a paper written by another and handing it in for credit
• submitting a paper from house files for credit
• claiming credit for artistic work done by someone else, such as a musical composition, painting, drawing, photo, sculpture, or design

Other Examples of Inappropriate Academic Conduct

• conspiring with one or more fellow students to engage in any form of academically dishonest conduct
• lying to an instructor to improve one’s grade
• having another student take one’s exam or do one’s computer program or lab experiment
• Submitting a paper that is substantially the same for credit in two different courses without the approval of both instructors
• altering a graded exercise after it has been returned, then submitting the exercise for re-grading
• removing tests from any location without the instructor’s approval
• stealing exams or other course materials from an instructor or his or her agent
• stealing or altering an instructor’s grade book or other academic records
• using spell-check or grammar-check software on a writing assignment when expressly prohibited from doing so
• accessing, changing, or using any information or data from a computer system to gain academic advantage for yourself or any other student.

GENERAL STATEMENT OF STUDENT RESPONSIBILITY

The student has full responsibility for both the content of academic assignments submitted for evaluation and the integrity with which all academic work submitted for evaluation has been done. Ignorance of an express rule regarding inappropriate student conduct does not excuse one from adhering to appropriate ethical standards in the completion of academic assignments. When in doubt as to the appropriateness of any action, students are to ask their instructors for clarification and guidance.

A period of time during which limitations on status may include, but are not limited to, loss of specified privileges with acknowledgment by the student that any additional breaches of academic integrity will result in additional, more severe sanctions being imposed.

A mandated discontinuation of student status and temporary removal from Cal Maritime for a definite period of time.

A permanent, irrevocable termination of student status. Expulsion from one campus of the California State University extends to all other campuses within the system.

Admission or readmission to Cal Maritime may be denied to any student found to have violated the provisions of Cal Maritime’s policy on Inappropriate Student Academic Conduct (Section 41303 of Title 5, California Code of Regulations).

Imposition of a sanction or denial of (or qualification placed on) admission or readmission means that a student is not considered to be in good standing for purposes of admission to any campus of the California State University system, for the period during which sanctions apply (Section 40601(g) of Title 5, California Code of Regulations).

All actions involving probation, suspension, or expulsion shall be made part of the student’s permanent academic record.