V. Class Requirements and Expectations
Full participation in the class, including writing, speaking, reading, and listening, is required.
In addition you will be bound by the conditions set forth in the Heritage Guide and your instructor. Please read both the guide and your syllabus carefully.
General Expectations
- Attend class regularly: Attendance is mandatory.
- Keep a notebook! You should write down your reactions to and notes about every text.
- Come to class well prepared and ready to engage in substantive discussions.
- Listen, question, and converse openly with a sense of purpose.
- Be respectful of everyone's contributions, and of differences in culture, ethnicity, gender, lifestyle, beliefs, and values.
- Do not arrive late, leave early, fall asleep, hold irrelevant conversations, use telecommunications devices or otherwise fail to pay attention; these behaviors interfere with listening and ultimately will reflect poorly on your grade. Students might score A's on papers but C's for the course because they are not engaged in class.
Attendance
If you miss more than six (6) hours of a Heritage class, including lateness and leaving early, you may fail the course. You may also fail the course if you do not come prepared to participate in class. No notes, handouts, or make-up work can adequately compensate for your lack of participation.
Registering for Class; Drop/Add Rules
To drop or add a class, please go the Heritage Studies Office in Lentz Hall (235). The program assistant or Director of Heritage must sign all add/drop slips to keep the sections balanced. Please keep in mind that missing your Heritage class to register for classes is not an excused absence.
How to Protect Your Work
You are responsible for being able to produce what you have done. Accidents do happen and should your instructor need another copy, you must be able to provide one. You should always keep both electronic and print copies of your work. You should also upload your work to Turnitin.com. Turnitin is a service the College provides. Ask your instructor about Turnitin.
Saving your work: There are a number of options available to you for saving your work. You can save your work on a floppy disk, burn your work to a CD, use a zip drive, use a flash or thumb drive, or email a copy to yourself. The Computer Center Help Desk can assist you with all of these.
Note: Excuses such as the "computer ate my work" or "my friend corrupted my disk" are not sufficient. Always keep multiple copies of your work in both print and electronic forms. If you are unsure how to save your documents properly, call the Help Desk at the Computer Center in the Hedberg Library (x 5900, or x 5950).
Academic Honesty and Plagiarism
In electing to come to Carthage, you are agreeing to uphold the academic policy of the College. For academic policies of the College, please go to the following site:
http://www.carthage.edu/campuslife/code/ccacadconcerns.cfm
If you cheat, plagiarize, or assist someone in cheating or plagiarizing, you may face course failure or worse: expulsion. Your work is considered your intellectual property. The keyword is property, and as there are laws against theft of property in the United States, so there are laws against stealing the intellectual or creative products belonging to someone else, even if you do it unintentionally.
What is plagiarism?
Plagiarism is the use of another person's ideas, phrases, images, etc. without proper attribution. Even paraphrasing without citation is a form of plagiarism. Rule of thumb:
if you are quoting any more than three consecutive words, or paraphrasing an idea, recapitulating (summarizing), or using an idea or conclusion from a source without proper citation, you are plagiarizing- that is to say, stealing.
You could also violate a copyright by reproducing any arrangement of facts, graphs, images, etc., without proper citation.
Penalties for Plagiarism
The Student Community Code states that plagiarism may be dealt with in the ways outlined below:
Warnings
Warnings are to be given by individual faculty at their discretion when they observe signs of inadvertent academic dishonesty. The student is to be warned in writing and no report is filed with the Dean of the College.
Failure of the Work in Question
This penalty may be administered at the discretion of the faculty member whenever he or she can show an academic honesty violation has occurred. A written report of the violation and penalty must be submitted to the Office of the Dean of the College, and a copy must be given to the student.
Failure of the Course
This penalty may be administered at the discretion of the faculty member whenever he or she can show an academic honesty violation has occurred. It is up to the faculty member to decide if a student fails the course or the work in question on a first occurrence. A written report of the violation and penalty must be submitted to the Office of the Dean of the College. A letter grade of F will be recorded for that course on the student's transcript.
Dismissal from the College
Any time a student receives two academic dishonesty reports in the Office of the Dean of the College, the student is automatically dismissed from the College. These can be reports of either failure in the course, failure of the work in question, or a report of one of the violations listed below. (The violations listed in the community code include computer fraud, library abuse, and false information).
For further details go tohttp://www.carthage.edu/campuslife/code/ccacadconcerns.cfm
How to Avoid Plagiarism
When taking notes, come to your own conclusion and reword what you wish to communicate in your own voice. Expressing your individual reaction to an idea, a work, or image will help you avoid plagiarism. Be sure to record the source of your information. Your instructor will help you apply the principles of oral and written communication so that you will learn how, when, and why to cite sources. Examples can be found in The Writer's Reference, pp. 331-3, 383-5, 419-21.
Whenever you pass off someone else's work (that is, his/her intellectual property) as your own, you are guilty of plagiarism. It does not matter what the source is: boyfriend, girlfriend, mother, father, friend, the web, magazines, journals, books, etc. Although access to the web on campus is free, that does not mean that you are free to cut and paste from a web document, then submit the work as your own. One student recently assumed that anything on the web is free, and thus not protected by copyright. Wrong! As soon as a document becomes fixed, that is, appears on the web or in any other electronic or print medium, U.S. Copyright laws and the Digital Millennium Act--protect it. It does not matter whether the web source has an author's name or not. Moreover, the real issue here is not so much that you have "borrowed" from the Internet, as it is that you are claiming that the ideas, words, arrangement, argument, etc., you have borrowed are yours. You are announcing to your instructor and class that you, and only you, wrote that paper, that the words and ideas on the paper originated in your mind, and that what is affixed to the paper is your property. In the academic world ideas are, generally speaking, the only currency a person has. By taking someone else's work and presenting it as your own, you are robbing that person of her/his currency.
If you change a few words, the work is your own, right? Sorry, you are still following another author's mode of expression. Changing tenses, using adverbs instead of adjectives, paraphrasing, rearranging words, etc. (See The Writer's Reference, pp. 333-4, 385-6, and 421-2 for tips on paraphrasing.) does not relieve you of the charge of plagiarism. If you follow a person's arrangement or line of thinking or argument, you are still guilty of plagiarism if you do not cite your source properly. See Professor Lochtefeld's useful examples that demonstrate clearly when a work is plagiarized and when it is not:
http://personal.carthage.edu/jlochtefeld/gened/plagiarism.html
Is it free if it appears on the Internet? Again, the answer is no. See the explanation above. Without a doubt, the World Wide Web makes the work of other students and writers readily accessible. When you take from a site without citing the author, you are stealing from a fellow human being or entity. To be blunt, many of the "free" student essays that paper mills encourage you to use are not well written. In fact, some of them are products of plagiarism. Thus, you are stealing from another thief.
What if you come up with an idea on your own and then you see the same idea in print? In this case what you need to do is acknowledge that you came across the idea on your own but later found it in another work.
Is it fine to cheat, plagiarize, and collude (that is, conspire with someone) if the course is a required class? No, there are absolutely no excuses for cheating, plagiarizing, and colluding. Business leaders often tell us that if a student cheats in college, he or she is likely to do so for the rest of his or her career. You simply do not fall out of bad/illegal habits when you receive your diploma.
Where can you go to get help shaping your ideas into your words? Go to the Writing Center in Hedberg Library. All the tutors are familiar with the kinds of papers you will be writing for Heritage, and they are willing to listen to your ideas and help you develop a strategy for writing a paper. Go to your instructor, too. All Heritage instructors are willing to assist you in your work. After all, we want you to become independent learners. You need to master writing papers, and the more you write, the better you will become.
Why should you be concerned about plagiarism? You should be concerned for a number of reasons. First, in an increasingly competitive world you are at a disadvantage if someone gains advancement through immoral or illegal means. In other words, you lose to someone who has used illegal means. Second, as a student at a liberal arts institution you need to be concerned about your integrity. Once you have lost your integrity, you cannot regain it. Frankly, integrity and honesty are more important than any discipline you master. Finally, every student is harmed when someone uses unfair means to earn a grade. Here at the College, we want to make sure that we protect the grades of students who have earned them fairly.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact your Heritage instructor.