Each student enrolled in a Florida Virtual School online course will adhere to the FLVS academic integrity policy. Any violation of this policy will result in disciplinary action and may jeopardize the student's continuation in the course and any award of academic credit.

• Academic integrity is a concept used to address the many facets of authenticity within a student's work. A student who upholds a high standard of academic integrity maintains that the work he or she turns in is authentic and true to the knowledge he or she has acquired.

• The technology age has certainly helped people have fast access to any and all information on the web. Because of this, you will see academic integrity becoming more of a standard in educational institutions as they begin to hold students to higher accountability measures.

• It is important that as you take courses online, you are equipped to appropriately utilize technology. The Internet can be a powerful research tool. The key is to know how to use it and what is appropriate.

Academic Integrity means...

• Your work on each assignment will be completely your own

• Your collaboration with another classmate on any assignment will be pre-approved by your instructor

• You will not practice plagiarism in any form

• You will not allow others to copy your work

• You will not misuse content from the Internet

Plagiarism is copying or using ideas or words (from another person, an online classmate, or an Internet or print source) and presenting them as your own.

Some examples of plagiarism:

• Buying a paper from a research service or term paper mill.

• Turning in another student's work with or without that student's knowledge.

• Turning in a paper a peer has written for the student.

• Copying a paper from a source text without proper acknowledgment.

• Copying materials from a source text, supplying proper documentation, but leaving out quotation marks.

• Paraphrasing materials from a source text without appropriate documentation.

• With the Internet, another type of plagiarism needs to be listed: Turning in a paper from a "free term paper" website.

Please be aware that all FLVS instructors utilize a myriad of technologies to check student work for authenticity, including but not limited to the upload of student work to TurnItIn.com. In order to maintain the integrity of all FLVS grades, instructors may choose to facilitate random oral assessments and/or face to face exams. If an instructor confirms that a student has plagiarized work in any manner, the student will be subject to consequences determined by FLVS administration and may be removed from the course with a failing grade.

Online instructors have a variety of resources available to them for checking authenticity in student's work. In many cases, it is easier for an online instructor to verify authenticity in a student's work than a traditional classroom instructor. As many resources are available to students, it is equally matched in the resources for instructors to verify.

Academic integrity is something that we take very seriously at our school. If students are caught violating the academic integrity policy, our school has well defined consequences. Please think very carefully before sharing your work, taking others' work, or giving others authority into your account via usernames and passwords. The consequences are not worth it and you are ultimately cheating yourself.