Plagiarism

Policy

Plagiarism is the act of presenting the material, concepts, or products of another person, group, or entity as one’s own work without providing citation or reference. Acts of plagiarism may include but are not limited to:

Copying the direct words or images of another person without using quotation marks and/or citing the original source.
Presenting another’s ideas in your own words without acknowledging the original source.
Failing to acknowledge collaborators on homework and project assignments.
Submitting work that you previously wrote for an assignment in another class without identifying it as such (self-plagiarism).
Using, paraphrasing, or copying content, statistics, images, and other materials directly from blogs, websites, or online publications without citing the original source.
Submitting downloaded papers, slide decks, or other documents without citing the original source.
Taking code written by another person or tool and presenting it as your own work. While some minor usage of existing code may be acceptable as 'fair use', extensive copying should be acknowledged through comments in the code itself that cite the original source.
A substantial portion of the assignment being generated by an AI tool. We understand that responsible use of AI tools, such as ChatGPT, Llama, or Claude.ai, is encouraged as a great way to get ideas, make suggestions, find errors, and refine assignments. This is very different from using AI to write your entire submission. The key difference is, a responsible use of AI would be making improvements to your own original content, versus an irresponsible use being that AI writes all the content for you.
Taking any code written by another person or tool and presenting it as your own work.

You may share Ideas among peers as long as you cite all sources accordingly.

This definition from the University of Birmingham School of Computer Science provides useful additional details about avoiding plagiarism as it relates to code:

Almost all computer programs contain many ideas borrowed from elsewhere. Many also contain short sections of actual code copied from elsewhere. For example, writing a section of program to create a new window on screen with a menu at the top of the window is often done by simply copying a few...lines of code from an example in a programming manual or textbook, either with or without a few minor changes. This is normally regarded as fair use and typically requires no acknowledgment. Any more significant copying of code from elsewhere should be acknowledged, however. The acknowledgment can be put in comments within the program itself. Reference to the source of the original material should be made in the same way as in essays or other documents (except that it may not be possible to use italics or other font variations). Obviously, it is not possible to put sections of code in quotation marks to indicate that they have been taken directly from elsewhere. Instead, the comments should make it clear which sections of code have been copied from elsewhere. Equally, the comments should make it clear when the basic method has been copied from elsewhere, but changes made to the details.

Respecting intellectual property and honesty in students' work are central to the Dev Academy values of Integrity, Kindness and Effort.

Procedure

Assignments submitted for assessment will be checked for academic integrity to compare them with submissions from other students and substantially AI-generated content.

Any student found to be plagiarising should expect to restart the work to which it relates from scratch, and Dev Academy reserves the right to withdraw a student per our policies on the grounds of academic dishonesty.

Attendance

Student Conduct