Academic Integrity Policy

In accordance with the mission statement at Piedmont University, it is the responsibility of each member of the Piedmont community to promote an atmosphere of academic integrity and an understanding of intellectual honesty that adheres to the highest standards of professional and personal conduct.

To protect intellectual and scholarly integrity, the University imposes strict penalties for academic dishonesty, which is defined as follows.

• Cheating — using or attempting to use unauthorized materials, information or study aids in any academic exercise.

• Deception – providing false information to an instructor or other academic administrator about an academic matter in order to achieve an unmerited advantage.

• Facilitating academic dishonesty — helping or attempting to help another to commit an act of academic dishonesty.

• Plagiarism — representing the words or ideas of another as one’s own in any academic exercise.

• Fabrication — unauthorized invention or falsification of any information or citation in an academic exercise or altering official university records or documents.
• Collusion – working in collaboration with others on an assignment intended to represent a single student’s work; or, improving or editing another’s completed work to the extent that the nature and quality of the original work is significantly altered.
• Course activities designated as quizzes, tests and exams are always to be completed by a student individually and without assistance from other people or resources UNLESS permission for collaboration or the use of external resources is explicitly permitted by the course professor(s).  Hence all quizzes, tests and exams are to be considered closed-book/closed-notes and closed-internet (e.g., Google searches).  Artificial intelligence apps are also banned on quizzes, tests and exams unless explicitly permitted by the course professor(s). 

Examples of Collusion

Collusion occurs when work presented as a students' individual work has been developed with the assistance of others. Absent specific authorization from the course instructor, each academic exercise or assignment is presumed to be prepared and submitted by one student acting individually and not together with others.

This doesn't mean that students can't study in groups and learn from one another, nor does it mean that students cannot ask for advice about how to accomplish an assignment from Academic Support or the Library. However, the result that is the required/graded submission must represent the student's individual thought and effort, unless the assignment was to produce a group's collaborative work.

Collusion occurs when you work without the authorization of your instructor to:

• work with one or more people to prepare and produce work;
• allow others to copy your work or share your answer to an assessment task;
• allow someone else to write or edit your work (an exception is receiving assistance from academic support or student success);
• write or edit work for another student;
• offer to complete work or seek payment for completing academic work for other students.

Examples of Deception

• Giving a false excuse for missing a project deadline;
• Claiming to have submitted coursework that one did not actually submit;
• Taking an exam or submitting coursework on behalf of someone else, especially when using their personally identifying credentials to do so;
• Forging an advisor's or instructor's signature on an academic form.