Academic Plagiarism

American schools are take academic honesty very seriously, but the idea of what this means can vary widely depending on your cultural framework. In some places, finding information in books or online and compiling it is very straightforward and not considered dishonest. In the US, academic honesty or academic integrity means that you do your work individually and give credit to anyone else's work that you used to inform your own.

Plagiarism is when you take someone else's work or ideas and present it as your own. Sometimes, students plagiarize without the intention to do so, but still face serious consequences.

Consider the following US Higher Education values or expectations about academic honesty:

• If you write a paper, essay, assignment, project, etc., for a class, all of the work must be your own. If you are conducting research, you must cite the sources that you are using.

• Copying and pasting other people's words is plagiarizing unless you quote them in your work. Most professors use a software to analyze your written work to be sure that it doesn't "match" any other published work.

• Unless a professor explicitly allows you to work with classmates in pairs or groups, sharing answers with each other is considered a violation of the academic honesty policy.

• Students may hurt their relationship with their professors, receive failing grades, or face other serious punishment for not living up to the standard of their university's academic integrity.

You may read more about Notre Dame's Academic Honor Code and Policies online.