Care of Supplies and School Environment

Academic Honesty

MWS is committed to encouraging students to assume responsibility for their own ethical behavior and to experience the joy of accomplishing their personal best. Academic honesty means avoiding plagiarism, cheating or misusing information. Students are expected to do their own work at all times, and understand that plagiarism and cheating will adversely affect grades and how students are perceived by others.

Plagiarism includes:

● Submitting someone else’s work as your own, including that of tutors, friends, parents or siblings or paraphrasing without giving credit to the source. ● Turning in purchased or copied essays (whole or partial) from the internet written by someone else. ● Helping others plagiarize by giving them your work when the assignment requires original work. ● Using someone else’s idea without giving credit to the original source.

Cheating Includes:

● Copying assignments or receiving answers from a classmate and turning them in as original work. ● Trading assignments with other students, even if you don’t think they will be copied or allowing a student to copy from your homework, test or quiz. ● Talking about anything to a classmate or exchanging any information during a quiz or exam once it has begun. ● Providing test questions or answers to test questions to students before, during or after quizzes or tests. ● Using unauthorized notes or technology, such as bringing notes into a test or using a computer program to translate an assignment and turning it in as your own. ● Presenting any material for credit that is not written by you. ● Filling in or changing answers on a test/quiz/assignment (yours or a classmate’s) while you are correcting it. ● Doing an assignment given to an individual student with a partner or group. ● Using summaries or commentaries (Cliff Notes, etc.) instead of reading the assigned material.

How to avoid plagiarism and cheating:

● Plan ahead. Rushing to get your work done the night before a big project is due may make it more tempting to plagiarize or cheat. ● Be sure you understand the assignments. Don’t always rely on your friends for information about what is required. Ask your teacher! ● Don’t read someone else’s paper or homework before you do your own work. If you get any ideas from them, you would have to cite that person as a source. ● Make sure you ALWAYS cite your sources. This means saying where you got the information you are using. Use phrases such as “According to...” and “In the book...” and cite ALL of the sources you used for information from in a bibliography.