Understanding Academic Integrity

In this scenario, you and your friend did not follow the instructor’s guidelines for the assignment and you each shared your work. The breach in this scenario is cheating.

How is this a Breach of Academic Integrity?

In college, students are encouraged to work in pairs or groups to learn from one another, clarify material, and gain experience from working in teams. But what is considered to be appropriate collaboration varies from course to course, professor to professor and assignment to assignment. In this scenario, the professor clearly stated that this was an individual assignment.

When you do not follow the professor's instructions regarding individual vs group work, you are committing a breach of academic integrity: according to Sheridan’s Academic Integrity Policy (2016), one of the ways that students cheat is by “submitting work prepared in whole or in part by another person and representing that work as one’s own” (p. 4). By copying one another's points, you and your friend both cheated.

Expectations for Collaboration

Appropriate forms of collaboration for individual work could include:

• Clarifying assignment expectations with a friend.
• Providing suggestions to a friend for revising work, such as pointing out awkward phrasing.
• Proofreading the work for spelling and grammatical errors, unless the assignment is being graded for spelling and grammar.