Statement of Affirmation by the Las Positas College Academic Senate on Academic Integrity

To support the education of students, the College provides the following definitions of Originality, Cheating, and Plagiarism:

Original Student Work is defined as student work that originates from the following:

• The student’s learning of skills, languages, grammars, operations, and/or formulas
• The student’s comprehension of reading materials and visual and oral instructions
• The student’s application of critical thinking skills like induction and deduction, evaluation and assessment.
• The student’s application of those critical thinking skills to summative assessments like presentations and lab reports and essays and documented research papers.

The development and practice of these skills over time will allow the student to develop creative and innovative solutions to academic and real-world problems. These skills may be developed with the help of the instructor, tutors, and study groups and technologies like calculators, the Internet, and artificial intelligence, but only with the permission of the instructor and in specific contexts defined by the instructor.

Cheating is defined as fraud, deceit, or dishonesty in an academic assignment. It may involve:

• Copying or attempting to copy from other students or from online sources during an examination or for an assignment;
• Communicating examination information to, or receiving such information from, another person during an examination;
• Preprogramming a calculator or computer to contain answers or other unauthorized information for examinations;
• Using, attempting to use, or assisting others in using materials that are prohibited or inappropriate in the context of the academic assignment or examination in question, such as: books, Web sites, artificial intelligence generators, prepared answers, written notes, or concealed information;
• Fabricating or falsifying of experimental laboratory data, or using laboratory data from other students or sources without instructor authorization;
• Allowing others to do one's assignment or a portion of one's assignment, using an artificial intelligence generator without the instructor’s knowledge, or using a commercial term paper service;
• Allowing someone else access to your secure online classroom to complete assignments or portions of assignments;
• Gaining unauthorized access to another student’s online classroom account;
• Altering examination answers after an assignment has been completed or altering recorded grades; and
• Resubmitting a previously written assignment for a new course without the permission of the instructor.

Plagiarism is defined as using another's work (whether printed, electronic, or spoken) without crediting him or her. Whereas cheating is almost always intentional, students sometimes plagiarize accidentally. It is vital, therefore, for students to understand the many different kinds of actions that constitute plagiarism:

• Submitting the whole of another's work as one's own (see the definition of "cheating" above: this includes submitting another student's paper or a paper obtained from an artificial intelligence generator or commercial term paper service as one's own);
• Using the exact wording of a source without putting that wording in quotation marks and citing it;
• Paraphrasing the wording of a source without citing it;
• Inadequately paraphrasing the wording of a source (not only the words, but the sentence structure of the original must be changed);
• Summarizing the ideas of a source without citing it; and
• Overusing the ideas of a source, so that those ideas make up the majority of one's work.

From discipline to discipline and course to course, students will find that instructors will sometimes use teaching tools like modeling (in which the student is asked to "model" his or her writing after another's), collaboration (in which students co-write or share ideas for an assignment), or experimental use of artificial intelligence in the early stages of an assignment. In cases like these, the instructor will be very careful to emphasize that the "use of another's work" is occurring within the specific parameters of the assignment. Such use should not occur in other contexts or without the supervision and consent of an instructor. Various professional organizations are developing protocols for citing AI, but again, use of AI should not occur without the knowledge and approval of the instructor.

Definition of plagiarism influenced in part by the academic honesty policies of Ohlone College, Fremont, California and Hamilton College, Clinton, New York; by "What is Plagiarism," Turnitin, 2003. www.turnitin.com. Accessed 10 Feb. 2004; and by Robert A. Harris, The Plagiarism Handbook, Pyrczak Publishing, 2001. For an example of AI citation in MLA style, see “How Do I Cite Generative AI in MLA Style.” MLA Style Center, https://style.mla.org/citing-generative-ai/. Accessed 12 July 2024.