Burris Laboratory School

Academic Honesty Policy

The purposes of learning, teaching, and evaluation cannot be fully achieved at Burris Laboratory School if students and teachers cannot be confident about whether work submitted for evaluation and grading purposes is a student's own product. It is essential that honesty, on the part of both teachers and students, be central to learning and evaluation. In an attempt to guarantee this end result, the following policy will be in effect.

  • Students will be clearly informed in course syllabi or classroom management plans what academic dishonesty consists of and what the penalties for being academically dishonest are.
  • Faculty will clearly explain this policy, especially as is appropriate for grade level, and will teach students what constitutes plagiarism.
  • Students will be given opportunities to demonstrate their understanding of plagiarism before they are penalized for it.
  • Faculty will be required to document the basis for their judgments of plagiarism, cheating, or any other form of dishonesty.
  • Students will be in violation of academic honesty policy in any of the following situations:
    • Copying the work of another student and representing it as their own.
    • Providing false information as to student contributions to group assignments.
    • Knowingly giving their work to another student to be used to misrepresent the second student's work.
    • Committing plagiarism in written work.
    • Violating copyright restrictions in video, taped, or duplicated material and representing such materials as their own work.
  • Responsible users of information always acknowledge their sources, both in formal and informal communications. Use information from the Internet in the same way as information from any other public, published source: tell users where the information came from to show that it's reliable. Email messages are private, and may not be quoted or sent on to anyone else without the permission of the original sender. Students must never use someone else's words or ideas without attribution because it can be illegal.