Standards of Academic Conduct

Bob Brown and Bob Harbort
College of Computing and Software Engineering
Kennesaw State University

"If I have seen farther than other men, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants."  This quotation, attributed variously to Sir Isaac Newton and Betrand of Chartres, exemplifies two principles of scientific progress—first, it is appropriate to build upon the work of others, and second, you must give appropriate credit when you do so.

Understanding the Rules of Academic Conduct

It is important that each of you understand the rules of academic conduct because universities, including this one, take the subject very seriously. The December 17, 1999, issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the head of Boston University's Department of Mass Communication resigned after mistakenly failing to give credit for a quotation used in a speech. It was clear from the circumstances that this was an accident. The department head was rushed to finish the speech and failed to provide a citation for his quotation. However, the rules of academic conduct don't say anything about accidents, and this accident cost a department head his job.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that such things only happen far away. Here at KSU a couple of years ago, a student only a few days from graduating turned in a plagiarized term paper. Instead of receiving a master's degree with his classmates, he was dismissed from school. This student will never receive a master's degree from a reputable institution, never hold a security clearance, never be elected to high office. His life has been changed, permanently and for the worse. You want to avoid that!

Offenses Against Academic Honesty

There are several areas where you could go wrong. Let's talk about each one of them:

• Plagiarism is the passing off as your own the words or ideas of others. Avoid plagiarism by providing a citation every time you use the words or ideas of someone else. If you use an exact quotation, surround it with quotation marks. Self-plagiarism is submitting the same work for credit to more than one class, and is prohibited by the KSU code of conduct.
• Fabrication and falsification include inventing experimental data or changing experimental data so that they tend to support your thesis, inventing references, or falsely attributing statements to others.
• Reference padding is the act of listing references you haven't actually read, either to meet a minimum imposed by the professor or to make it look like you did more work than you actually did.
• Cheating is giving or receiving unauthorized help on academic work, or obtaining unauthorized access to examinations or other academic material. Here at KSU, giving unauthorized help is considered as serious an offense as receiving it.
• Other academic misconduct includes destruction, mutilation, or theft of resources such as library books or laboratory equipment, alteration or falsification of records, acts that undermine or interfere with the free exchange of ideas, and acts that interfere with the impartial evaluation of students' academic progress.

Some of you are wondering why we take our standards of academic conduct so seriously here at Kennesaw State. A few of you may even be rationalizing that no one is hurt by dishonesty. Nothing could be further from the truth. When you cheat, you cheat yourself of a part of your education, and of some of the money you or others are paying for that education. You cheat your colleagues of a fair comparison with their peers. You set a bad example for your peers and the students who follow you. You diminish your own reputation in the eyes of your colleagues. Finally, and most important, you damage the reputation of the university, and so diminish the value of your diploma. No one wants a degree from an institution that has the reputation of tolerating cheating, and no one wants to hire a person with such a degree. Dishonesty while you are in school will hurt you for the rest of your life.

The Road to Academic Success

Here are four rules for avoiding academic misconduct and following the road to academic success:

• Avoid procrastination. Lack of time increases the temptation to commit academic misconduct. If you find yourself in the last week of the semester with no start on your term paper, you may be tempted to plagiarize, or even to buy a paper. In the hours before an exam for which you aren't prepared, you may consider cheating. However, if you keep up with your work, you will be prepared for the "crisis points" in your courses and there will be no need to cheat.
• Understand the policies of the university, your school and department, and your classes. As with any endeavor, it's hard to avoid breaking the rules if you don't understand them. The university rules are spelled out in the official catalog. School, department and class policies will be in a syllabus, or explained by your professors early in the term. If you are not sure, ask. No one will think less of you for asking about a particular rule or policy, but a misunderstanding could end your academic career.
• Reduce temptation. During examinations, put notes and books away, not only out of your own sight, but out of sight of your colleagues as well. Don't look at the work of others or allow others to look at your work. Except during examinations, most of your professors will encourage you to work with your classmates. Know what the policies are and don't stray near the boundaries.
• If you're not sure, try the "mother test." If you are not certain whether a particular act is honest, ask yourself, "Would I want my mother to know I did this?"

Let's look at some specific things you can do to avoid the danger spots of academic dishonesty:

Avoid plagiarism by being careful to use quotation marks every time you quote the words of another. Cite every reference to other work, whether quoted or paraphrased. Cite as you write.  "I forgot to go back and do the citations" is not a defense against a charge of plagiarism.

The same standards apply to lab work, programming assignments, and other technical assignments. Everything you turn in must be your own work, or you must cite the source of material that you included but did not develop yourself. In some classes, including the work of others may not be allowed at all, even with citation. Be sure you understand the policies of the class.

You cannot use the same paper for two or more classes. Did you know that? It's called self-plagiarism, and is prohibited by the KSU code of conduct. This is an example of the need to understand the rules. You are expected to do original work for each of your KSU classes. What you can do is refer to work you did for another class. If you refer to your own work in an earlier paper, quote and cite just as you would the work of another author.

When you do research, you must describe it. You can't just say, "43% of households have computers." If you obtained this number from another source, you would cite the source. If, however, you polled your classmates to find out how many had computers at home, you must describe how you selected your subjects and how you conducted your poll. It would be sufficient to say, "I conducted a poll of 100 randomly-selected KSU students. Of those polled, 43% reported having computers in their households."

With one exception, you do not need to provide citations for well-known facts. Well-known facts are those you can recall without a source and can find in essentially the same form in at least three different sources. This rule applies to facts, not ideas or opinions. If you are giving your own opinion, say so. If you are giving another's, provide a citation.

The exception to the rule above is that you should provide citations for facts from other disciplines even if they are well known within that discipline. The purpose of such a citation is to help the reader, who may be an expert in the primary field of your paper, but may not be familiar with the other discipline. For example, suppose you were writing a paper on computer control of a nuclear reactor. You might write, "... radioactive decay is Poisson distributed but may be approximated with a Gaussian distribution for high decay rates. [JOHN69]" This is a well-known fact to radiation physicists, but it is arcane material for most computer scientists, and so requires a citation. The reference entry would be:

JOHN69: H.E. Johns and J.R. Cunningham, The Physics of Radiology, Charles C. Thomas, Publisher, 1969, page 542.

How Students Get Caught

Some of you may be thinking that you're clever enough to cheat or plagiarize without getting caught. The likelihood that you can get away with academic dishonesty at KSU is smaller than you think. Consider the following things:

• The human brain is an excellent pattern recognizer. It's easy for someone reading a paper to say, "hmmm... I've seen that somewhere before." That's all it takes! Once the pattern has been identified, finding the source is generally easy.
• Your professors are experts in their field. Work that may seem obscure to you is likely to be very familiar to your professors. Until you are an expert in the field, it will be very difficult for you to know what is obscure and what is widely read.
• Your professors know your writing style. By the end of a term, your professors will have been exposed to your writing in homework, labs, and examinations. They'll recognize your individual writing style, and they'll note a departure from it if they find one in an examination answer or a paper.
• Your colleagues are writing on the same subject. You aren't the only person in your class answering the exam questions and writing papers. Your colleagues are writing on the same subject, and generally with access to the same references. If a classmate cites something appropriately, your un-cited use of the same material will stand out like a sore thumb.
• If you get away with it, you will become more aggressive. Suppose you fall prey to temptation and plagiarize a paragraph or two from an obscure text. Possibly you even get away with it. If you do, you'll be tempted to go further the next time. Eventually you'll be caught, and probably the circumstances will be so egregious that you will be dismissed from school.

Buying or Borrowing Papers

At some point every one of you will have an opportunity to "borrow" a paper from another student or to buy a paper that you then present as your own. There are even Internet sites that specialize in helping students cheat in this way. Consider that the people who do this are themselves liars and cheats. What makes you think they won't cheat you? A few years ago a student here at KSU submitted a paper that turned out to be a verbatim copy of a chapter from his professor's master's thesis. Imagine that student's surprise when he was confronted with the original! He was, by the way, permanently dismissed from school and his appeal to be readmitted was denied.

How the Faculty Feel

By now you may have the idea that the members of the faculty spend their time looking for evidence of dishonesty so that they can "nail" students. Nothing could be further from the truth. First, faculty don't have to look very hard to identify dishonesty. It leaps off the page at us. Second, the general reaction upon uncovering a dishonest act by a student is sadness and disappointment. We members of the faculty want each and every one of you to succeed, and we know that you have the intellectual capacity to succeed. We are disappointed when you try to cut corners. Punishing academic misconduct is one of the most difficult and unpleasant things we do. Yet it is necessary in order to uphold the reputation of the university.

You have the intellectual capacity to succeed here at Kennesaw State University. It is up to you to apply the hard work and discipline to succeed, and we have every confidence that you will do so.