VITAL Academic Integrity Policy

Academic integrity is a core value of VITAL Upper Cumberland e-Learning Network. We are a learning organization dedicated to helping students make decisions that will help them become productive and ethical adults and citizens. We use a variety of tools to ensure the integrity of student work such as: ? Online plagiarism detection to compare student work to work found on the Internet. ? Our teachers are experienced in the classroom and they have extensive expertise in identifying the originality of student work. ? Instructors may at any time choose to engage students in an informal oral assessment via phone to allow students to demonstrate mastery of content as well as verify that thestudent’s work is their own. Teachers may request a scheduled face to face unit test or exam at any time. Generally academic integrity violations fall into three broad categories: Plagiarism Representing work that has been copied or pasted from a published resource such as, but not limited to, Internet sites, printed media, or any other source without the proper credit. Cheating Representing any other person's work or work from any source including hard drives, software, or answer banks (such as, but not limited to Yahoo! Answers, Craigslist, translator services, etc.) as your own. Examples include soliciting answers or help via any form of digital communication, documented inappropriate discussions, student to student cheating, and cheating in a lab classroom. Sharing or selling work Sharing a virtual or hard copy file of any work, whether compensation occurs or not, or posting work to a secondary source, such as, but not limited to Facebook. Consequences A variety of consequences can be administered if students are caught cheating or plagiarizing ranging from a chance to redo the assignment to expulsion from the VITAL program. See the chart below.