The University of Phoenix believes that students must always be responsible for submitting their own work and for making sure that their work reflects their own original words and ideas.Academic honesty pertains to the adherence of the student to the university’s rules on submitting his or her own original work and citing all relevant sources.Violations of academic honesty include 1.) having someone else write one’s work or having someone revise one’s work extensively, 2.
) copying parts of the entirely of another person’s work with or without that person’s knowledge, 3.) using information from outside sources without citing them properly (University of Phoenix, 2008).This last description is known as plagiarism. Plagiarism is defined by the university as the conscious and intentional submission of “the words and ideas of another” as a student’s own work in a university recognized academic exercise (University of Phoenix, 2008).
Academic exercises are any and all graded activities that are assigned by the instructor to the student. Examples of such activities include but are not limited to term papers, oral and written reports, examination essays, and the like. Content that can be found as plagiarized include but are not limited to blocks of text found in hardcopy and online publications, verbal and visual communication that clearly originated “from an identifiable source” (University of Phoenix, 2008).Therefore, the university includes provisions and procedures by which students’ work can be checked for academic dishonesty. Papers submitted can be ran through a plagiarism checking software that is able to cross reference the completed work with various databases on the internet that would be able to identify whether or not parts of the submitted work were copied from other sources (O’Malley, 2008).Upon detection of plagiarized material, the software would be able to pinpoint where the original material is and alert the instructor of the erring student accordingly.
Alternatively, instructors have the right to question students about their work and ask them about its content to make sure that they were the ones who actually wrote it.Academic dishonesty is a serious offense and is punishable at least by a failing grade for the given assignment. In cases of plagiarism, excessive plagiarism may result to the failure of the entire course and repeated offenses may result to other sanctions which can include expulsion from the university.Understanding the policyThe academic policy of the University of Phoenix emphasizes the need to maintain an honest academic atmosphere in order to keep up the academic quality of the university.
The mission of the university is to teach its students and help them grow academically.When a student plagiarizes, there is no learning that happens because the student is not able to explore his or her own thoughts and simply copies that of another. If the university allows this practice, then the quality of education that it offers is degraded.One of the major reasons why students enter the university is to earn higher degrees which would give them access to better employment.
However, employers make it a point to keep track of the credibility of universities where they get their employees from. If plagiarism in the university goes unchecked, prospective employers will not trust the graduates of that particular university.Therefore, the University of Phoenix enforces such policies on academic honesty not only for its own benefit but more so for the benefit of its students. Furthermore, the university’s academic policies do not enforce the near-impossible task of coming up with completely original content that contains no material from any outside sources.On the contrary, the university encourages research and values the works of others as a means for its students to learn more.
However, it maintains that there are proper procedures for using outside sources which when followed completely makes students free from the liability of plagiarism.
