Sanford MYP Academic Honesty Policy
2014
Philosophy of Integrity
Sanford teachers work to create an atmosphere that helps students reach high expectations without the pressure and competition that can drive students to cheat. We strive to support the development of integrity in our students, and to create a context in which academic dishonesty is seen by students as unnecessary. We believe that helping our students grow in integrity is one of the most important functions of middle school.
We strive to teach our students to be academically honest so that each student will:
● Approach learning actively rather than passively.
● Complete their own work.
● Assist classmates rather than allowing them to cheat or copy.
● Learn how to use citations on information found from other sources.
● Understand why giving credit for others’ work is important.
● Grow as inquirers, thinkers, and as principled and reflective students.
Definitions and Examples
● Academic Misconduct: Misconduct means violating this policy. Misconduct includes plagiarism, cheating, collusion, duplication of work, or any other behavior that gains an unfair advantage for a student or that affects the results of another student, such as falsifying data, misconduct during an exam, creating spurious reflections.
● Authentic Authorship: Creation of a product - essay, model, etc - that is the genuine work of the student claiming authorship.
● Cheating: Using notes or other materials to find answers when that is not allowed; getting answers from anywhere other than the student’s own knowledge.
● Collusion: Supporting academic misconduct by another student, as in allowing one’s work to be copied or submitted for assessment by another.
● Duplication of Work: The presentation of the same work for different assessment components.
● Intellectual property: The ownership of ideas and control over the representation of those ideas.
● Plagiarism: The representation, intentionally or unwittingly, of the ideas, words or work of another person without proper, clear and explicit acknowledgement.
● Proper Citation: The act of citing or quoting a reference to a passage or authority. Citation must be in appropriate (MLA) format.
Teaching and Support
To teach and support Sanford’s policy on academic honesty, teachers will:
● Explicitly teach the definitions and examples, so students understand the expectations of the policy.
● Teach MLA citation format when students are conducting research.
● Provide multiple opportunities for students to relearn & retest an objective to lessen the pressure for academic dishonesty.
● Work to create assessments with multiple formats through which a student can show what they have learned.
● Enforce the Academic Honesty Policy consistently.
● Provide opportunities for shared inquiry, collaboration and cooperative learning.
● Ensure that violations of the policy become opportunities to teach and not just to consequence.
Consequences
Consequences depend on the severity, intentionality, and repetition from the individual student.
Parents will always be contacted. In addition, consequences may include one or more of the following: decreasing the grade; requiring a re-take of an exam or re-do of an assignment; detention; and/or restitution as necessary.