Integrity Code

Academic Integrity

All submitted coursework is assumed to have been completed only by the individual student.  Students are responsible to observe standards on plagiarism, cheating and properly crediting all sources used during the composition of work.  Students who fail to abide by these standards will be reported to the administration, which may result in a conference with the Learning Coach, failure of the course assignment or exam, loss of credit for courses, revoked access to courses and suspension/ expulsion from the school.

Cheating

Cheating is the use of another person’s work to gain an unfair advantage.  Cheating occurs when a student knowingly submits the coursework or an assessment of another individual and claims it as their own original work.  Examples of cheating include but are not limited to the following:

• Copying a classmate’s work; this may be an answer to an essay question, any written assignment or exam.
• Copying from course feedback provided by another school.
• Copying answers to exams found in other sources, such as entering the question into a search engine and copying the response found online.
• Collaboration between two students, which results in submitting identical answers on such assignments.
• Using online translators for assignments in language courses.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is using an author’s work, without acknowledging the source of the material.  Examples of plagiarism include, but are not limited to the following:

• Quoting work from an outside source, without proper citations and attribution.
• Improper paraphrasing of another person’s work, maintaining the original text with little alteration or re-wording and/ or not citing the source.
• Copying information from a book, play, speech, article, website or other written or spoken work without proper citation.
   

Plagiarism may occur unknowingly.  It is important to understand that simply acknowledging a source through quotation marks or comments is not the same as citing it.

Academic Integrity Violations

All students who violate principles of academic integrity will be reprimanded.  Depending on the nature of the offense, a student’s grade or ability to earn credit for a course may be affected at the discretion of the student’s teacher and Georgia Cyber Academy administration.  Violations of academic integrity will be reprimanded per the following guidelines:

• The first offense will be handled between the classroom teacher, administrator, student and parent/ learning coach.  The teacher will provide additional instruction as to what constitutes plagiarism and/or cheating, and the student will receive a zero on the assignment.  Depending on the severity of the infraction, the student may have an opportunity to make up the assignment at the discretion of the teacher.  The student will be required to attend a meeting with Georgia Cyber Academy administration regarding the plagiarism.  If more than one violation is discovered at the same time, it will be considered the student’s second offense.
• A second offense will result in a meeting with the school administration, the student, the parent and the classroom teacher.  Students will have no opportunity to make up questionable work and a grade of zero will remain.  Further action may be taken, as needed, following the discipline policy.
• In the case of a third offense, a meeting will be held with the school director, a classroom teacher, the student and their parent.  The meeting may result in one or all of the following: removal from the course with loss of credit, removal from Georgia Cyber Academy and/ or denial of re-admission.