Academic Integrity Policies

Academic Rights and Responsibilities 

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Academic Integrity requires that the following rights and responsibilities apply to every student at Bemidji State University. All members of the academic community, including students, are responsible for helping to make sure that each student enjoys each of these rights. Every student in turn must live up to each of these responsibilities: for these are things that others have a right to expect. These responsibilities are owed to our academic community as a whole and to its various members and stakeholders, including the student's own self and fellow students, faculty, administrators, and staff, plus employers and clients present and future who depend on the student's (or graduate's) expertise and integrity, and the public that owns and supports this institution. 

Every Student's Rights: 

1. Access to learning. Students have the right to attend all classes for which they are registered, and to receive instruction in those classes from the faculty assigned to teach them. Students with documented disabilities have a right to reasonable accommodation, to ensure their enjoyment of this right. Students also have the right to consult with their instructors during regular office hours. 
2. Academic freedom. Freedom of inquiry, discussion, and debate are vital to academic life, and students share fully in these freedoms, consistent with the rights of other students and faculty. Opinions expressed by students in the exercise of this right are subject to challenge and rebuttal by others, but should not be silenced except where the expression interferes with others' access to learning. 
3. Information about academic courses, programs, and requirements. Students have the right to accurate and reasonably detailed information regarding the content and requirements of any course they are attending, and the basis on which their own work in the course will be evaluated, to be furnished in the form of a written syllabus within a week of the start of the course. The content and conduct of each course must be consistent with its catalog description and syllabus. Students also have the right to competent faculty advice in planning how to meet all the requirements for any degree or licensure they are seeking. 
4. Fairness in academic evaluation. Students' academic work shall be evaluated impartially according to criteria that are consistent with course objectives as outlined in the course syllabus. 
5. Confidentiality and privacy. When it is requested by the student and to the extent permitted by law, a student has the right to confidentiality in the student-teacher relationship. 
6. Due process. Students are entitled to due process in disciplinary proceedings regarding academic integrity, as outlined later in this document; this right further includes the right to advance clarification from instructors, on request, regarding how the following principles of academic honesty apply to their courses and will be interpreted.

Every student's responsibilities:

1. Honesty in academic work. 
1. Original work, except as specifically agreed or stipulated by the instructor, or explicitly and exactly acknowledged within the work itself, or both. Facts, ideas, analyses, and interpretations gleaned from external sources, as well as quotations and paraphrases, must be scrupulously identified and acknowledged, except for those facts and ideas which are so generally and freely circulated as to be part of the public domain. 
2. In examinations: 
1. Students must each perform their own work individually, without copying or consulting other students' efforts, or attempting to do so, or facilitating others' doing so, except insofar as the instructor has authorized collaboration. 
2. Students must not seek or avail themselves of advance access to the contents of any examination yet to be published or administered, or facilitate others' doing so. 
3. Students must not consult or contrive to have access to unauthorized sources of information such as crib sheets, or facilitate others' doing so. 
3. Students must not contrive to have other persons substitute for or impersonate them, and must not themselves substitute for or impersonate other students, either in examinations or in other class meetings.
   
4. Students must not falsify, fabricate, destroy, alter, or otherwise tamper with research results or academic records. 
2. Respect for the rights of others as outlined above. 
3. Behaviors contrary to Academic Integrity expectations may result in academic consequences determined by the course instructor and/or disciplinary action determined by the University Conduct Board. In any case in which a student feels unsure about a question of plagiarism involving work to be submitted, the student is obligated to consult the teacher on the matter before submitting it.