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Community Standards at Lehman College

This guide is designed to help students, faculty, and staff understand and navigate Lehman College’s Community Standards—principles that foster a respectful, safe, and inclusive learning environment. Grounded in the belief that the university is a sanctua

What is Academic Integrity?

Academic Integrity is an important factor in your success at Lehman College. As a student, you are expected to turn in honest and quality work free from any form of cheating, plagiarism, and unauthorized use of Artificial Intelligence. Students will use their own learning alongside cited sources to demonstrate learning, debate an issue, and mastery of topics.

Academic Integrity is a commitment, even in the face of adversity, to six fundamental values: 

  • Honesty: Honesty forms the indispensable foundation of integrity and is a prerequisite for full realization of trust, fairness, respect, and responsibility. To demonstrate honesty: 
  • Trust: The ability to rely on the truth of someone or something is a fundamental pillar of academic pursuit. Members of the academic community must be able to trust that work, whether student work or research, is not falsified and that standards are applied equitably to all.
  • Fairness: Impartial treatment is an essential factor in the establishment of ethical communities because it reinforces the importance of truth, ideas, logic, and rationality. Important components of fairness include predictability, transparency, and clear, reasonable expectations.
  • Respect: In an academic community, respect is reciprocal and requires showing respect for oneself as well as others.
  • Responsibility: Upholding the values of academic integrity is both an individual duty and a shared concern. 
  • Courage: Taking a stand to address a wrongdoing and defending Integrity. 

Adapted from the International Center for Academic Integrity (2021) The fundamentals values of academic Integrity, 3rd ed. Available at https://academicintegrity.org/aws/ICAI/pt/sp/home_page. 

CUNY Academic Integrity Policy

  • Cheating - is the unauthorized use or attempted use of material, information, notes, study aids, devices, artificial intelligence (AI) systems, or communication during an academic exercise.
  • Plagiarism - is the act of presenting ideas, research or writing that is not your own as your own. Unauthorized use of AI-generated content; or use of AI-generated content, whether in whole or in part, even when paraphrased, without citing the AI as the source.
  • Obtaining Unfair Advantage - is any action taken by a student that gives that student an unfair advantage in his/her academic work over another student, or an action taken by a student through which a student attempts to gain an unfair advantage in his or her academic work over another student.
  • Falsification of Records and Official Documents -

What is Plagiarism?

Plagiarism is the process of presenting the work or ideas of another person as your own without giving them credit and providing an appropriate citation. Students can avoid plagiarism by giving credit to others, either by: 

  • Paraphrasing information found on scholarly sources and restating it in your own words while giving credit to the original author of the idea. 

  • Direct Quoting is when you reproduce the idea or text word-for-word inside "quotation marks" while giving credit to the original author.

Whether direct quoting or paraphrasing, you need to create an In-text citation to indicate where you found that information. By creating an in-text citation, you are assuring that you are giving credit to the original source. 

 

Plagiarism could have serious consequences, such failing an assignment or entire grade.