Academic Integrity

What is ethics?  Ethics is the set of moral values that develop inside an individual throughout the individual’s life as a result of environmental and intrinsic factors.  Ethics are the values that you use to guide yourself.  An individual’s ethics determine how they behave, how they hold their self, and how they confront certain situations.  Personally, these definitions of ethics are very hard-to-relate to.  I have my own personal rule that I can use whenever I question whether a certain action or path is ethical.  I simply ask myself whether I would be proud to tell my grandchildren or grandparents what I did.  In order to be content with the choices and decisions I make, I cannot have any regrets and by asking myself this question, I can better assess whether I should take that action or go down that path.  For me, ethics and behaving morally means there are three simple rules I need to follow to the best of my ability. (1) Never cheat.  (2) Never lie.  (3) Never steal.  These actions are not beneficial to anyone.  They are not things that I would be proud to say I have done.  So, my academic integrity pledge is very straightforward: Don’t cheat.  Don’t lie.  Don’t steal.

Plagiarism is something that violates all three components of my academic integrity pledge.  Plagiarism involves cheating, lying, and stealing.  Plagiarism is a form of cheating.  It involves breaking the rules to gain an unfair advantage.  By plagiarizing, I am not doing the work for myself.  I am using someone else’s ideas and words.  This gives me an unjust edge over other students who are limited to just their own thoughts and opinions.  Plagiarism is a form of lying.  By plagiarizing, I am knowingly turning in someone else’s work and claiming that it is my own.  Plagiarism is a form of stealing.  If you plagiarize, you are stealing another individual’s ideas.  You are taking what is theirs and saying it is yours.  Because plagiarism is a clear violation of both academic rules and my own personal system of morals, I will not plagiarize.