Breaches of academic integrity occur when academic work is not done in an ethical way. Academic breaches include originality, integrity, fairness, collegiality, and responsibility. Breaches are avoidable!

Students breach academic integrity when they deceive readers about the origins or nature of their work. Assignments include any of your work that is assigned in a course, including labs, essays, experiments, reviews, posts, and more. Assignment Misconduct is broken down into two categories: plagiarism and fabrication or falsification.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism: Students plagiarize when they represent the work of others as their own, including words, ideas, information, data, computer code, images, and all other intellectual or creative material. In specific terms, students plagiarize when they submit work that:

• appears to be original work when it is, in whole, or in part, drawn from other sources without full and clear acknowledgement.
• is copied from other students.
• was purchased from, or generated by, a third party or service.
• has been previously submitted and graded, in whole or in part, in another course.

Fabrication or Falsification

Fabrication or Falsification: It is a violation of academic integrity to invent data, sources, quotations, or other material with the aim of presenting that material as genuine research or experimental results.

Exam Misconduct

Students breach academic integrity when they unfairly represent their knowledge and ability as greater than it is. Exam refers to any examination, test, quiz, or evaluation other than formal written assignments. Whether or not a take-home exam is a written assignment or an exam will be determined by the course instructor and communicated to students. Students commit exam misconduct when they:

• look at the work of another student in an effort to reproduce that student’s answer.
• ask for, or provide, answers to another student, and similar behaviour, during an exam, test, or quiz.
• make use of unapproved notes, references, communications, digital resources, or any other prohibited means of securing answers.
• obtain an unauthorized copy of an exam, text, or quiz in advance for the purpose of preparing answers ahead of time.
• facilitate the exam misconduct of another student.

Attribution

This chapter is an adaptation of  2.1 What are Breaches of Academic Integrity?  by Donnie Calabrese; Emma Russell; Jasmine Hoover; and Tammy Byrne and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. You can download this book free at Academic Integrity Handbook Copyright © 2020.