Copying

Another way to avoid academic integrity violations might be pretty obvious, because it’s the intentional kind. Good, old-fashioned copying. You may have just read this list, but it's worth repeating.

It is a violation of academic integrity to present someone else’s work as your own. That means:

• You cannot buy a completed assignment from someone else on the internet.
• You cannot reuse an assignment that someone else completed in a previous semester.
• You cannot pay your roommate to complete your assignment for you.
• You cannot crowdsource your assignment, either online or in real life.
• You cannot avail yourself of any of the many, many other creative ways to get around actually doing the work yourself.

You probably already know these things. Copying of all sorts tends to happen when you are under what might seem like too much pressure. Perhaps something unfortunate has happened this semester, and you feel as though you are drowning under a mountain of work that you can’t focus on. Maybe you want to help a friend who has just been through a rough few months. There are a lot of situations where the ethical cost of copying or sharing your work illicitly seems a lot less important than the intense pressures of life on you or your friends.

Believe it or not, your instructors understand that these sorts of things happen. But they also know how to use the Internet and other resources to investigate suspected copying. They went through decades of school to get where they are - they know how this all works.

So if you are feeling pressure to copy, or allow someone to copy your work, keep in mind that getting caught is far more likely than you realize. And while instructors can sometimes show leniency in the face of tough situations in the lives in their students, they will not show the same leniency in the face of copied or intentionally plagiarized work.