DEFINITION OF AN ACT OF ACADEMIC DISHONESTY
Iowa Wesleyan University divides acts of academic dishonesty into two broad categories: cheating and plagiarism.
Cheating
Cheating is defined as any of the following acts or combination of acts:
- fabrication of data/data manipulation
- use of crib sheets/cheat sheets
- copying information from another person’s work
- unauthorized sharing of answers/information between students
- unauthorized gaining of or giving access to exam questions
- tampering with an exam
- theft or sale of papers/projects/exams
Selling of a project/exam is considered a more serious violation of the Academic Integrity Policy because of the deliberate attempt to profit from another student’s vulnerability and will carry heavier penalties.
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is the intellectual theft of another’s ideas. It involves the failure to accurately cite the sources used in researching a paper or project, both in the body of the paper/project as well as on the Works Cited or References page.
Because plagiarism can fall on a gradient from minor to severe, Iowa Wesleyan University separates
plagiarism into the following categories of severity based on the “Did I Plagiarize?” chart created by Dr. Curtis Newbold, which can be found in classrooms and other spaces around campus as well as www.TheVisualCommunicationGuy.com.
The categories are as follows:
- Half-hearted: student mostly cited things correctly, but got sloppy on some and failed to note small things like page numbers or publishers
- Miscue: consistent mistakes in citations (wrong words, wrong author, something similar)
- Reflection: some or no citation problems, but the work closely reflects someone else’s
- Mosaic: some or no citation problems, but the work uses very little of the student’s own thoughts or opinions
- Warp: deliberately misrepresenting a citation or citing a source out of context
- Ghost Citation: citing sources that don’t exist or making up what the source actually said
- Remix: rewording a source or sources to make it sound like the student’s own idea(s)
- Recycle: a student reusing a large portion of a work from a previous class without current instructor approval and/or citing themselves i.e., self-plagiarism
- Mitosis: a student reusing an entire work from a previous class without current instructor approval i.e., self-plagiarism
- Cherry-pick: a student cherry-picking a few words or phrases to change but keeping the rest of the text and ideas from another’s work relatively unchanged without giving credit
- Copycat: a student copying large portions (entire paragraphs or sections of another’s work and not giving full credit)
- Identity Theft: a student stealing, purchasing, copying, or selling an entire document and taking full credit for the work
The response to these infractions will be determined by the degree of severity and consideration of the context of the infraction, as outlined in the policy below. While all of the above actions are serious enough to be reported and penalized in some way, selling of a paper/project is considered a more serious violation of the Academic Integrity Policy because of the deliberate attempt to profit from another student’s vulnerability and will carry heavier penalties.