Academic Honesty

Principles

Biblical principles guide our school ethos. Several of the Ten Commandments address principles related to honesty, including. ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.’ Exodus 20:16 and, ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ Exodus 20:15. The IBO ensures that students are given equal opportunity to demonstrate their academic proficiency through standards of integrity, knowledgeability and principle.

GSIS strives to uphold the highest standards of academic honesty. The GSIS faculty and staff instruct and encourage students to be principled and to act with integrity, to act with independence, and to pursue personal excellence. By teaching students to be responsible users and consumers of information, GSIS provides consistent opportunities to model and to promote the ethical use and dissemination of information, thus ensuring that only a student’s authentic work is considered for submission.

Philosophy Behind the GSIS Policy

GSIS educates and encourages students with the expectation that they will be well versed in the principles and standards of academic honesty and will reflect upon those standards, applying them in their academic work. Provision is made for clarity and understanding of what Academic Honesty principles and policies are in place for GSIS. These provisions are outlined below, and are contained within Student Planners, as well as being posted and accessible on the school server, within Schoology, as well as available for regular review by teachers. In addition, Student Planners provide [in future, nb] a list of the digital databases that GSIS subscribes to, and their logon information. Providing these resources is a reminder to students, and furthers their awareness, of the need to use credible, reliable and correctly cited sources. Students are taught how to communicate the sources of information used in their work by properly paraphrasing, referencing and citing those sources. The school invest heavily in multiple, reputable databases to further ensure the integrity of sources, and their authenticity. The school library website provides materials and information dissemination and instruction to students, and provides teaching materials and resources pertaining to plagiarism, citation of sources in multiple styles and for multiple formats.

There may be instances that occur, especially with newly arrived students, for example, where these policies are not yet inculcated into the student’s academic understanding of responsibility, or through simple innocence in grey areas of academic research and collaborations. In these cases, student (s) are given corrective and educational opportunities to address their deficiencies in understanding the principles and practices of academic honesty. Corrective, and educational resources, including this policy itself, are provided for the students, parents and teachers on the GSIS Library website in a specially designated area titled ‘Academic Honesty’.