Overview of Attendance and Honesty Policies
I go into more detail about these policies in both the syllabus and the other files which are linked in this week’s folder. Here are the bare bones (and you can assume that most other courses and teachers have very similar policies).
Attendance
Generally, attendance is required at every one of our class meetings listed in the syllabus. The exceptions are times when the university has closed for weather or some other reason (quite rare) and times when the instructor is ill and cannot attend (also quite rare).
Attendance does count as part of your grade. Here’s how it works:
- Here on time or an excused absence for a valid reason: 100% of the day’s credit
- 10 – 20 minutes late: 50% of the day’s credit
- Sleeping, studying for another course or generally playing on your phone or computer: 25% of the day’s credit
- Unexcused absence (which includes showing up more than 20 minutes late): no credit for the day’s attendance
If you want an excused absence, you must ask for it. You do not receive an excused absence automatically. If you are traveling on university business (athletes fall into this category), your coach or advisor should have given you paperwork or sent me an email asking for your excused absence.
At the end of the semester, I will forgive one week of unexcused absences.
Honesty
A teacher’s personal thoughts about plagiarism
Plagiarism is really sad—especially from students who make it a habit—because the plagiarist is making three assumptions:
- The student is assuming that he/she does not have the ability to do the work and cannot learn how.
- The plagiarist is assuming that the teacher is too stupid to figure out what is going on.
- The student who plagiarizes assumes that knowledge and skill do not count in his/her profession—the only thing that counts is the grade in the grade book because (obviously) any untrained person could do the work.
All of the courses at Ashland University are governed by the Class and Coursework Policies Academic Integrity Policy. Here are the highlights:
- Everything you submit must be your own work.
- It does not matter if you got something from a source you paid, a free source such as Wikipedia, or simply had your roommate write the paper for you: If you didn’t write it but claim that you did, that’s plagiarism.
- A key word here is “substantial.” If three or four words are identical to a source, that’s not usually a problem, but when you’ve got a whole line or more that’s lifted from the source without credit, you have committed plagiarism.
- Playing the dictionary game doesn’t turn the piece into your own writing. When the source says “itinerant” and you change the word to “traveling,” you haven’t made the quotation into your own writing. Changing the source’s “sixties and early seventies” to “1960s and 1970s” does not make it yours.
- Academic papers routinely quote from sources, using MLA, APA, or some other citation format. This is perfectly acceptable. If you have done a good job of citing the source of your quotation, you have not committed plagiarism.
- Inventing a source or inventing “data” from a source is a violation of academic integrity.
- Submitting the same paper twice without permission from both instructors is a violation of academic integrity. This is true whether you are submitting the paper to two different courses or submitting it again to attempt to pass a course you previously failed.
- Help is available. Teachers, librarians, and the Writing Center staff can help you stay out of trouble if you are uncertain whether you are committing plagiarism or do not know how to cite a source.