Cheating and Plagiarism
InnovOak School will instruct students in the practice of acceptable citing and referencing strategies in order to ensure that all non-original thought or work is identified, and credit given to the author.
Plagiarism is the presentation of someone else’s work as one’s own. It may involve borrowing large amounts of material from un-named sources or changing a few sentences or words from another source without proper references.
InnovOak’s goal is to teach the proper use and referencing of another author’s work as an accepted and important part of research and scholarship. Teachers will teach students about acceptable and fair use as well as the ethics around using the work of others as one’s own. This skill is also the accepted academic manner in which to use the ideas and writing of others. Proper research and reference procedures will be taught in all courses where these skills are important.
Students should understand the seriousness of this issue. All secondary educational institutions have serious consequences for academic misconduct of any type. Students have been removed from their programs, degrees stripped, and credits removed from former students who have violated plagiarism policies.
Most plagiarism issues stem from either fear of failure or a time management issue. Teachers will design assessments that help students to manage their time (such as incremental deadlines to help students manage a bigger project or cumulative assessment. The multiple breakdowns of assignments into parts allows teachers to measure different levels of understanding and also helps students invest in the work process.
Students will need to show demonstrable steps in their learning and provide any rough work, outlines, or jot notes as needed. This will help demonstrate their learning beyond the final product. Handing in a final product with no supporting work evidence does not allow teachers to see the evidence of learning necessary for evaluations.
Work submitted by students who fail to properly cite their sources will not be evaluated. These cases will be considered as unintentional plagiarism, and teachers will work with students to identify the citation problems and give students an opportunity to resubmit the work.
To support academic integrity and student learning around the importance of not plagiarizing work, students will have access to http://Turnitin.com which uses the internet to produce a report that outlines any plagiarism issues.
Students will be expected to upload all submitted work to http://Turnitin.com and produce a report that they attach to any finished work. Assignments will be incomplete without this report.
Students who intentionally try to submit the work of others as their own either through plagiarizing another’s work or cheating on a test or assignment, will face escalating disciplinary consequences for breaching the school code of conduct of respect for self and others.
In these cases, the student work submission will not be evaluated. Teachers may look for other evidence of student achievement of the curriculum expectations covered in the omitted task as evidence of student achievement, or they may require that the student re-submit the work within a shortened time frame.
Students and parents should be aware that failure to submit authentic student work products may result in course failure if the student has not produced evidence of achievement of each of the overall expectations by the end of the course.
Behavioral consequences will involve consideration of a continuum of behavioral and academic responses, based on the following four factors:
the grade level of the student;
the maturity of the student;
the number and frequency of incidents; and
the individual circumstances of the student.
Teachers will report all consequential incidents of cheating and plagiarism to the Principal.