Academic Honesty

Greenville University is committed to helping students improve writing. The university expects all courses to contain a writing component as part of the evaluation of student progress. We expect students to produce written work that is focused, well developed, organized, and relatively free of grammatical, punctuation and spelling errors. Papers that fall short of this standard will not be accepted; the work will be returned to the student for revision within a reasonable time. Students on a Christian college campus are expected to do all academic work with integrity. This means that they should practice academic honesty without exception. The University takes this so seriously we ask all incoming students to sign a statement guaranteeing that they understand the notion of academic integrity and will conform to the policies described below.

All forms of academic dishonesty, which include cheating and plagiarism, are inappropriate on our campus. Cheating and plagiarism are variations on a theme: both involve offering the work of another as one's own.

Students cheat and/or plagiarize when they:

• Give or receive aid from another student or other person during a test, quiz, or homework assignment when they were told to work alone.
• Copy all or part of another student's work-an exam, worksheet, homework assignment, essay, speech, musical composition, web production, etc.-and submit it as their own work.
• Copy all or part of any published or copyrighted source such as a book, periodical article, or musical composition and submit it as their own work.
• "Cut and paste" information from a digital source such as a CD-ROM or web page and submit it as their own work.
• Steal ideas or conceptual frameworks from another source and submit them as their own without giving proper credit to the source.
• Submit other people's work as their own (e.g. a roommate's term paper or one purchased over the Internet).
• Ask someone else to complete a writing project for them and revise and edit the work in such a way that they are not really the one responsible for the final document. (Please note GU's faculty often encourage students to share their work in progress with others, in fact the University even pays writing tutors to help students think through revising an assignment. This is simply a good habit for any scholar that we fully endorse. What we don't want students to do is let another person take over and complete an academic task that is their own responsibility.)

This list is not exhaustive but should give a clear idea of what constitutes academic dishonesty. In general terms, academic dishonesty occurs when people knowingly or unknowingly take credit for words or ideas that are not their own in work that is produced for a class, presentation, publication, or other public domain. All forms of cheating and plagiarism involve intellectual theft, and thou shalt not steal!

Students are responsible to use appropriate quotation marks whenever they use words from another source. They must cite sources for ideas that originated with others. They are responsible to learn the specific documentation methods required in their chosen academic disciplines. Whenever they are in doubt about how to cite sources or use others' writings in their own, they should ask a professor.

At GU, academic dishonesty has severe consequences. If instructors discover any instance of cheating or plagiarism, they are well within their rights to assign a failing grade for that assignment or for the course. Furthermore, they must report the student to the department head and the Office of Academic Affairs. This office will forward the information to the appropriate deans. If a second instance of academic dishonesty occurs, the student will receive a failing grade for the course, and the case will be forwarded to the Vice President of Academic Affairs for review and possible further disciplinary action. A student may be expelled from the institution for repeated or extreme violations of academic integrity. Appeals can be handled through the normal judicial process.

Note from the Center for Teaching and Learning: Recycling previous work – even if it is your own work – is also known as “self-plagiarism.” If you see an opportunity to reuse work you have completed for another class, be sure to get instructor approval before doing so.

Institutional expectations on AI tools:

• unauthorized use of ChatGPT (or other AI tools) on assessments, writing assignments, and other academic work, is considered to be a breach of academic honesty and considered academic misconduct.
• Use of this technology can lead to breaches of:  
• cheating, if they are using an AI tool to gain an improper advantage on an academic evaluation when it has not been authorized by their instructor.
• plagiarism if they are using images created by another, i.e., through the use of DALL-E or another image-generating tool when not authorized by their instructor and not attributed to the creator.
• Instructors can have different expectations for AI tools, and if it is permitted by one instructor, this does not mean it will be permitted by others. 
• Greenville University’s plagiarism detector, TurnitIn, is now capable of showing a percentage of assignments submitted that may have been AI-generated.