Academic Integrity and Plagiarism
Plagiarism is just one example of academic misconduct. The Aggie Hornor System Office provides the following definitions of academic misconduct and acts that are characterized as scholastically dishonest:
Cheating: Intentionally using or attempting to use unauthorized materials, information, notes, study aids or other devices or materials in any academic exercise.
Fabrication: Making up data or results, and recording or reporting them; submitting fabricated documents.
Falsification: Manipulating research materials, equipment, or processes, or changing or omitting data or results such that the research is not accurately represented in the research record.
Multiple Submissions: Submitting substantial portions of the same work (including oral reports) for credit more than once without authorization from the instructor of the class for which the student submits the work.
Plagiarism: The appropriation of another person's ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit.
Complicity: Intentionally or knowingly helping, or attempting to help, another to commit an act of academic dishonesty.
Abuse and Misuse of Computer Access: Students may not misuse computer access or gain unauthorized access to information in any academic exercise. See student rule 22.
Violation of Departmental or College Rules: Students may not violate any announced departmental or college rule relating to academic matters.
Violation of University Rules on Research: Students involved in conducting research and/or scholarly activities at Texas A&M University must also adhere to standards set forth in University Rule 15.99.03.M1 - Responsible Conduct in Research and Scholarship.
Additional information can be found at the Aggie Honor System website.
Reasons for Academic Honesty
There is no end of opportunities to plagiarize or commit acts of academic dishonesty. Here are few reasons why you shouldn't:
Individual reputation: While acquiring a reputation for academic dishonesty can ruin your reputation with the faculty of the institution, it can also have detrimental effect on your status with your acquaintances and friends.
Personal integrity: The reality that you may have completed a degree program may be tarnished by the knowledge that you did so fraudulently.
Professional competence: You may be called upon to use the specific skills or knowledge that you were supposed to have acquired, but you plagiarized instead.
Intrinsic quality of degree: You, as a student, are here to learn – how to research, how to write, how to think – and you are paying for the privilege. By plagiarizing, you are, in a very real sense, shortchanging yourself.
Status or standing of the institution: Ultimately, the awareness of academic dishonesty, either acknowledged or uncertain, finds its way outside of the University, to other institutions, employers, former students and the world-at-large, affecting the perceived value of the degree and the integrity of the University.