Academic Honesty Policy

CrestAt Central Middle International School, we believe that honesty is a virtue and that all members of the school community have an obligation to treat the work and ideas of others with integrity. Towards this end, the school commits itself to educating its community on what academic honesty is, how to be academically honest, and how to take responsibility for the representation of their own and others ideas.

A. We believe that all students:

  • should be honest in presenting all their school work
  • should not cheat
  • should seek inspiration from the ideas of other people and understand that it is acceptable to use the ideas of others; they just need to be acknowledged
  • should understand that their teachers value their ideas and want them to present their ideas using their own language and voice
  • should know that you must say "no" to others who want to copy their work
  • should know that working in groups can be a wonderful learning experience, and what students present to their teacher is their own work, expressed in their own words
  • should understand the benefits of properly-conducted research and respect for the creative efforts of others
  • should be given the opportunity to understand what academic honesty is and how to uphold the International School's academic honesty expectations

B. We believe that all teachers:

  • should model good practice in academic honesty
  • should provide clear guidelines for learning tasks
  • should promote the benefits of properly-conducted research and respect for the creative efforts of others
  • should design learning tasks that require thinking skills and are not able to be completed by simply copying or falsifying information
  • should ensure that all their students understand a task's requirements
  • should follow through with appropriate consequences when encountering instances of academic dishonesty
  • should use anti-plagiarism tools as teaching instruments in raising awareness of academic honesty
  • should make clear what the expectations are regarding academic honesty, such as referencing, bibliographies, etc.
  • should scaffold larger tasks, with opportunities to submit interim work or with milestone checks, to help students maintain their own 'voice' in completing these tasks

Definitions of terminology used to describe academic honesty:

  • Academic honesty: Behaving and working honestly in researching and presenting schoolwork. This includes respecting the ownership of the ideas and material of other people, and behaving appropriately when sitting exams.
  • Plagiarism:(the representation of the ideas or work of another person as the student's own) - includes the borrowing of words, ideas or data from an original source and blending this original material with one's own without acknowledging the source
  • Collusion:supporting malpractice by another student, as in allowing one's work to be copied or submitted for assessment by another
  • Duplication:the presentation of the same work for different assessment components and/or MYP requirements
  • Intellectual property: Includes patents, registered designs, trademarks, moral rights and copyright. The law protects many forms of intellectual and creative expression.

Academic Dishonesty can be:

  • Planning with another to commit any act of academic dishonesty
  • Fabricating data for an assignment
  • Any other behavior that gains an unfair advantage for a student or that affects the results of another student
  • Misbehaving during an examination, including any attempt to disrupt the examination or distract another student
  • Exchanging, or in any way supporting or attempting to support, the passing of information that is related to the examination
  • Cheating/copying/impersonating the work of another student
  • Failing to comply with the instructions of a staff member during any examination
  • Including offensive material in a script for reasons other than analysis or intellectual inquiry
  • Stealing examination papers and selling to others
  • Disclosing or discussing the content of an examination paper with a person outside the immediate school community
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