Academic Honesty means that any work you do for a class represents your own work. It is the result of your own thinking, researching, and writing.

Let's think about it from another perspective...Academic Dishonesty includes "cheating, plagiarism, and falsification of documents." (University Catalog, 2007-2008, p.30) All of these are forms of stealing and lying, things that we avoid when living according to our Christian principles.

But what does this REALLY mean??

• It means that when you are givien an assignment, you do the work yourself. You don't work on it in a group with everyone sharing answers - unless the professor says that group work is OK.
• It means that when you don't understand how to do something, you get help rather than copying someone else's answers.
• It means that when you turn in a paper, you have written it yourself and that all the ideas are yours unless you have given proper credit to others.
• Bottom line: It means that your professor can trust that everything you put your name on is actually a product of your own scholarship (reading, thinking, researching, writing, etc.).

Photo credit:

Westcott, Tyler [aka "MumbleyJoe"]. "Pigeon Point Lighthouse ." Photo taken 17 November 2007. Posted to Flickr 18 November 2007 <http://www.flickr.com/photos/mumbleyjoe/2043508173/>. Permission granted to copy <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/deed.en>.