Academic Honesty

Overview of Academic Honesty

This class is all about you and your voice. As your professor and writing coach, I want to hear what you have to say, not what anybody or anything else (including an AI generator) has to say for you. Grammar issues? We've all got them. Problems with development? Writing is hard work! If you set your goal toward improvement, you will be on the right path, and that's where I come in. My goal is to help you improve your written communication skills and thought processes. Work diligently with me, and by the end of this course, you will be a stronger academic writer.

You are expected to submit your own original work written specifically for this course. All sources quoted, paraphrased, summarized, or otherwise borrowed from, must be given proper credit through the use of quotation marks, parenthetical in-text citations, and Works Cited pages. (See a recent edition of an MLA Handbook for specifics on documentation.)

Whatever you submit to this course must be authentically you.

Plagiarism Defined

Plagiarism is "the action or practice of taking someone else's work, idea, etc., and passing it off as one's own; literary theft” (Oxford English Dictionary). The standard of academic conduct includes as plagiarism the passing-off as one's own work any AI-generated text (from Chat GPT, Gemini, or Bard, for instance, or heavy use of an augmented grammar service such as Grammarly or QuillBot to launder one's work).

More on AI as Plagiarism

Prohibited use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) includes both generating writing and laundering/enhancing pre-existing writing (such as with heavy use of Grammarly, Quillbot, and Microsoft Editor *). Students must refrain from using AI on all assignments for this course, including but not limited to journal entries, short or long answers on quizzes/exams, and discussion posts/responses.

Passing off AI-generated writing — including work heavily laundered by an augmented grammar service * — as any portion of submitted work is expressly forbidden. Note that a submission does not need to be 100-percent AI-generated to be considered plagiarized.

Question: Is submitting AI material as one's own work considered plagiarism?

Answer: Yes.

Question: Is Grammarly, Quillbot, Microsoft Editor, the Google equivalent, or any other augmented grammar service considered AI?

Answer: Yes, when it launders sentences and paragraphs. *

* Note: Products such as Grammarly, Quillbot, and Microsoft Editor, do far too much heavy lifting for the student in a college English course. As acceptable alternatives, use the standard spelling and grammar features built in to Google Docs and MS Word, which are sufficient for proofreading purposes and do not overly-launder one's work.

Course Plagiarism and AI Policy

Plagiarism constitutes a breach of academic conduct for which the college imposes severe penalties. If course work in any form contains plagiarism of any kind, including AI usage, the following will occur:

• The piece in question will receive an automatic zero and cannot be made up.

• Previously-submitted work will be re-checked and retroactively scored as zero if any plagiarism is detected.

Depending on the severity of the case, further disciplinary action may be taken. Flagrant cases of plagiarism will be reported to the vice president of student learning. See Cerro Coso's Academic Integrity page for additional information.