Academic Integrity
OVCA seeks to establish academic integrity within the school community. In cases where academic integrity may be in question, your student’s teacher, at any time, has the authority to collect work from lessons marked complete, host a live testing session with the student for the work completed and/or assess mastery of the content through an additional assignment. This may include marking the lessons in question as “not completed”. Entering progress completed in a very short period of time compared to the allotted time assigned for completion is an indicator of possible questionable progress.
OVCA has identified the following as unacceptable practices, including, but not limited to:
- Cheating in its various forms, whether copying another student’s work, allowing your own to be copied, using unauthorized aids on an assignment or test; having someone else complete an assignment or test for you; submitting as your own another person’s work; etc.
- Plagiarizing (e.g. presenting as your own the words or ideas of another person), including inadequate documentation of sources (electronic, internet, or print) and excessive dependence on the language of sources even when documented, relying on similar order of sentences while altering a few words or word order
- Using copyrighted material without appropriate citation or copying software or media files (such as music, movies, etc.) without permission
- Fabricating data: This includes falsifying or manipulating data to achieve desired result, reporting results for experiments not done, or falsifying citations in research reports
- Destroying, tampering, or altering another student’s work to impede academic progress
- Signing into a Class Connect session for another student who is not present, or leaving a Class Connect session without logging off or indicating that you have “stepped away” from the session;
- Falsely reporting completion of assignments
- Using answers from Yahoo answers or any other similar site as your own.
All are to be completed only by students. Students are responsible for observing the standards on plagiarism and properly crediting all sources relied on in the composition of their work. Failure to abide by these standards will be reported to administration and will result in a conference with the student. Students who violate this policy are subject to the following consequences.
Consequences:
- 1st offense – Warning and education about plagiarism. Opportunity to redo plagiarized work for 50% credit. Note made in student file.
- 2nd offense – No credit for plagiarized assignment. Conference with administration and note in student file. May not promote from course(s) without more proof of mastery through teacher graded assignments or portfolio sessions.
- 3rd offense – Student is referred to administration for disciplinary actions which may include suspension or expulsion.
SOURCE CITATION
Many courses require written work in which students need to cite sources. Any direct quotations from a textbook can simply be cited as (Author, Page Number). Any quotations from outside sources require full citations, including author, title, publisher, date of publication, and page number. If a student cites information found on a Web site, he/she should provide the complete Web page or site title, URL, author if known, page number if applicable, and publication date of the site, if available, and date of access.
This information is from the Board-approved OVCA Handbook for SY 2023-2024, revised August 2023.