Tyler Junior College encourages its students to develop abilities to explore and present ideas with integrity through the writing/learning processes and to understand that a reliance on honest academic learning and research procedures is the surest way to success in both college and life.
Tyler Junior College supports the concept of intellectual property: ideas belong to the people who come up with them. Plagiarism and collusion involve offering the ideas and/or words of others as your own and without proper acknowledgement and, as such, violate academic integrity. Within this context, therefore, plagiarism, for example, is theft and is thus a legally punishable offense. Academic dishonesty of any kind will not be tolerated at Tyler Junior College. It is within this context that the following expected academic integrity and plagiarism/collusion policies are established:
1. The College plagiarism policy is set forth in the ÒStudent Code of ConductÓ section and under the grade related academic grievance process in the Tyler Junior College Student Handbook.
2. Each instructor at Tyler Junior College has the authority to set guidelines for his/her class in regard to academic integrity Ð including plagiarism and collusion. These guidelines should be included in the syllabus.
3. Students are responsible for familiarizing themselves with the policies of their individual instructors, and for asking questions of their instructors about any specific point of policy in order to clarify academic integrity concerns. Students are also encouraged to use TJCÕs Writing Lab as a learning resource for researching, writing, and authenticating documentation procedures.
4. The enforcement of plagiarism policies may vary per instructor. Consequences may include the following: grade on work reduced, work graded as a zero, student required to resubmit new work correcting the plagiarism, and course grade reduced to F.* This list is not exhaustive. In addition, all Tyler Junior College instructors can and may use all available resources available to them to deter and/or detect academic dishonesty. Tyler Junior College has software available to faculty for detection of plagiarism. The software, Turnitin@, compares papers against a database of scholarly work from various institutions.
*In the event of a dispute, the burden of proof regarding academic integrity lies with the student.
May 3, 2005