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Academic Dishonesty

Vanderbilt handles plagiarism and other forms of intellectual dishonesty through the Honor Council, whose homepage you can link to from here.

For sites on the growing problem of Internet plagiarism -- including advice on how to avoid and how to detect cyber-plagiarism -- see further below.

To Students: Plagiarism cases are handed over the Honor Council and may result in an automatic “F” for the course and possibly suspension or expulsion from the University. Always acknowledge your source for any idea that is not your own. The Internet, unfortunately, has begun to tempt some students to pull materials from the Web without acknowledgment. Apparently it is not well known that instructors and the Honor Council can easily search the Web for plagiarism sources, so ease of plagiarism is matched by ease of detection, and the number of students failing “W” courses owing to Internet plagiarism has been rising over the last few years. Please don’t make this mistake, which makes students and instructors almost equally unhappy. 
To Instructors: For the Honor Council procedures instructors need to know, go to an excerpt from an Honor Council publication, Role of the Faculty in the Honor System of Vanderbilt University. One of the most important things to know is that instructors should not handle plagiarism cases on their own. If Vanderbilt's Honor Code is to work, such cases must be handed over to the Honor Council when there is clear evidence of a violation. Without hard evidence, you shouldn't bother. While instructors should not devote huge amounts of time to detective work, it is often relatively easy to catch cyber-plagiarism simply by entering a distinctive phrase into a search engine, such as the charmingly named dogpile.com. The following links provide further resources.

For more information, please contact Mark Wollaeger.