F. Cheating, Plagiarism, and Documentation
The Yale College Executive Committee has approved the following memorandum to Yale College students as an explanatory supplement to General Conduct and Discipline, section A, of the Undergraduate Regulations.
By coming to Yale, you have implicitly asked the College to help you develop a broadly based, highly disciplined intelligence; you've asked not just to learn material, but also to be guided toward a deep and supple understanding of the subjects you study. Course readings, lectures, and discussions are all crucial elements of this learning. Less obvious, perhaps, is what your own writing contributes to this process. It may sometimes seem that exams, lab reports, and papers are meant primarily to measure how much you've learned. But when you complete written course work, you are not demonstrating what you've learned, but are rather doing the very work of synthesis and reflection that constitutes advanced learning. Every writer has had the experience of making discoveries while writing an essay. To have this discovery is to make knowledge, and making knowledge is what joins you to the project of the university.
Students who cheat forfeit the opportunity to make such discoveries. Certainly there are other reasons not to cheat. If you borrow unacknowledged ideas or language from others, you are stealing their work, which denies them their due credit and also impedes the free exchange of ideas that the university depends on. Yale regards cheating as a serious offense, for which the standard penalty is two semesters of suspension. But the much more grievous wrong is to the cheating student. Your writing is one of the most powerful sites of learning; students who turn in someone else's work, therefore, are giving away the very substance of their educations.
College course work frequently ask students to build on previous scholarship, or to collaborate with other students. The following definitions may help clarify the proper procedures for conducting and documenting these collaborations.
You may not submit the same paper, or substantially the same paper, in more than one course. If your topics for two courses coincide, you must have written permission from both instructors before either combining your work on two papers or revising an earlier paper for submission to a new course.
One form of cheating is either to copy answers from other students, or to refer without written permission to notes, books, laptop computers, cellular phones, or other programmable electronic devices. In addition, the use of cellular phones to discuss or obtain answers from another student, whether present in the classroom or not, is prohibited.
Another form of cheating is to change one's answers on a returned examination and then request regrading. It is your responsibility to make sure that you submit the examination exactly as it was; any alteration is culpable.
For take-home examinations, and for examinations for which the questions are distributed in advance, instructors should make the rules clear, and students should obey them to the letter. If you are in any doubt as to the meaning of the instructions governing such exercises, you should seek explicit clarification from your instructor. The ordinary expectation is that you will prepare your answers by yourself; collaboration with others is acceptable only to the degree precisely and specifically described by the instructor. In any case, the answer you finally submit must represent your own understanding of the issues. If you think that it has been significantly influenced by consulting books or other people, you should say so, just as you would in a paper.
Plagiarism is the use of someone else's work, words, or ideas as if they were your own. Thus most forms of cheating on examinations are plagiarism; but we usually apply the word to papers rather than to examinations.
If you use a source for a paper, you must acknowledge it. Initially, many students fear that acknowledging sources obscures their own original contribution to a paper. But the very idea of writing in a university is to trace your participation in a conversation of scholars. Showing how your ideas derive from and comment on the ideas of others is one of the high achievements of mature academic writing. It would be a mistake to downplay this achievement in an attempt to suggest greater originality. What we really want to see is an intellectual interdependence between student writers and their sources.
What counts as a source varies greatly depending on the assignment, but the list certainly includes readings, lectures, Web sites, conversations, interviews, and other students' papers. Every academic discipline has its own conventions for acknowledging sources. Your instructor should make clear which conventions you must use. But even if you're confused about the specific punctuation and formatting, you must make clear in your written work where you have borrowed from others—whether data, opinions, questions, ideas, or specific language. This obligation holds whether the sources are published or unpublished.
Submission of an entire paper prepared by someone else is an especially egregious form of plagiarism, and is grounds for the imposition of a particularly serious penalty, even for expulsion from the University.
D. Problem sets and ungraded written assignments
Many instructors assign work that allows you to practice and develop skills in a low-stakes format, less formal than a paper and often ungraded. Collaboration with other students is common practice in many such courses, but you should ask your instructor for a written explanation of what kinds of collaboration are appropriate.
Many laboratory reports are constructed on some form of exercise in which observations are made and the results of these observations tabulated or processed in some manner. There are two violations of originality which can occur with this form of assignment:
1. Falsification of Data. The practice known as "dry-labbing," constructing observations out of one's head or borrowing the observations of others as if they were one's own genuine data, is an offense of such gravity that—in the professional world—it results in total excommunication from the community of scientists. In undergraduate work the comparable sanction is suspension.
2. Cooperation in Treatment of Data. Often a class is given a common set of data with an assignment to analyze the data and report the results. Sometimes when extensive routine analyses must be made, it is tempting for students to organize so that the total work load is divided among several students. The ordinary assumption must be that this type of cooperation, however sensible it may seem, is strictly forbidden unless explicitly permitted by the instructor. The best policy is to ask at the time the assignment is made.
Submission of material, such as a chemical product, not actually obtained from an experiment performed by you is a flagrant act of cheating. Purchasing the product in the marketplace, "borrowing some product" from a classmate, or obtaining a sample surreptitiously from another laboratory all constitute serious offenses. In the preparation of products by synthesis, using "excess starting materials" to promote a better yield of products is also cheating.
Finally, it should be reiterated that the prohibition of cheating and plagiarism is not meant to restrict either free discussion and exchange of ideas among students or studying the work of other scholars. Such activities are the very essence of education. Nor are the rules of citation meant to engender a dependent mentality. You are at Yale to study the work of others in order to learn to think for yourself. If you follow that principle you will never cheat or plagiarize.
