The reputation and success of an educational institution, including its students, graduates, and faculty, depend upon the honesty and integrity of all the members of the School community. Therefore, the responsibility for maintenance of both the appearance and substance of academic honesty and integrity must be borne by all students, staff, and faculty.
Academic honesty requires the submission of one’s own work for credit or evaluation. It precludes cheating on an examination of any type; offering, giving, soliciting, or accepting information about an examination other than that provided or allowed by the instructor; and soliciting or hiring another to provide one’s own work or answers in an assignment or examination. It is assumed that written work offered by a student for evaluation and credit is the student’s own. Failure to acknowledge indebtedness to another’s ideas or written work will be considered plagiarism. Students are expected to avoid collusion by refraining from collaborating with another person or persons in the preparation of case notes, presentations, reports, journals, or portfolios unless the collaboration has been approved in advance by the instructor.
The use of false or misleading information or statements to gain admission to ADLER or to seek employment, practicum assignment, or postsecondary admission elsewhere by a student or former student at ADLER constitutes credential misrepresentation.
Plagiarism
All academic progress and knowledge are based on and builds upon the knowledge created by previous researchers, creators, and thinkers.
The following principles are fundamental to the integrity of academic work and to the law regarding Intellectual Property Rights and Copyright:
- To acknowledge previous researchers, creators, and thinkers through the proper use of the accepted conventions of citation and referencing, and
- To obtain permission, when required by law, to use the ideas and creations of others in academic work.
Plagiarism is an act that violates both principles. At ADLER, plagiarism is defined in two parts: intentional and unintentional.
Intentional Plagiarism
Intentional Plagiarism is the act of using the work, ideas, theories, art, expression and materials of another person and intentionally misrepresenting those things as your own or obscuring the identity of the original creator or author.
It also includes using your previous work and misrepresenting it as novel or submitting it in another context without acknowledgement that you have used the same work for another course or submission. This does not apply if you have written permission from the teaching faculty to whom you are submitting.
Intentional plagiarism is seen by the school as an extremely serious failure of both scholarship, education, and leadership, and as such, the consequences can be significant and have a considerable impact on the academic progress of a student.
Unintentional Plagiarism
Unintentional Plagiarism is committing any of the above acts but doing so out of a lack of knowledge or ability or through accidental oversight – either through entirely omitting a citation or reference or by citing incorrectly. This also applies to inadequate paraphrasing or misquoting through using secondary sources.
Unintentional plagiarism is still unacceptable at any academic level, but the school recognizes that this kind of transgression is better resolved at a course level, with appropriate penalties and consequences.
Identification & Investigation
If an instructor suspects that there may be plagiarism in a piece of student work, they may follow any or all of these steps. Note: Asking a student to participate in these steps does not imply or conclude in any way that the work is plagiarized – instructors have the right to investigate their concerns about student work before escalating the concern to the Dean or Registrar. Students are required to comply with instructor requests regarding their work.
- Have a discussion with the student outlining their concerns
- Ask the student to produce notes relating to the work in question
- Use an automatic plagiarism checker (e.g., Turnitin) to assess if there is questionable text
If the instructor’s concerns are not addressed through these steps, they will take their concerns to their immediate Dean or Director, who will begin an investigation according to the Academic Dispute Resolution Process.