What Constitutes Academic Dishonesty at WPI
Individual integrity is vital to the academic environment because education involves the search for and acquisition of knowledge and understanding, which are, in themselves, intangible. Evaluation of each student's level of knowledge and understanding is an essential part of the teaching process, and requires tangible measures such as reports, examinations and homework. Any act that interferes with the process of evaluation by misrepresentation of the relation between the work being evaluated (or the resulting evaluation) and the student's actual state of knowledge is an act of academic dishonesty. The following acts constitute academic dishonesty at WPI:
Fabrication
Examples:
- Altering grades or other official records
- Changing exam solutions after the fact
- Inventing or changing laboratory data
- Falsifying research
- Inventing sources
- Sabotage of another student's work or academic record
Plagiarism
Examples:
- Misrepresenting the work of another as one's own
- Inaccurately or inadequately citing sources, including those from the Internet
Cheating
Examples:
- Use of purchased term papers
- Copying on exams, homework or take-home exams
- Use of unauthorized materials or sources of information (e.g., cheat sheet, preprogrammed calculator)
- Assistance of another person in cases where prohibited
Facilitation
Examples:
- Sharing test questions or answers from an exam with another student
- Letting another student copy a solution to a homework problem, exam or lab
- Taking an exam for another student
- Assistance in any act of academic dishonesty of another student
