The faculty and students at Walton High School honor academic and personal integrity. We believe that every student has the right to learn in an environment free from academic dishonesty. Everyone has the duty to display honesty, integrity, respect, and responsibility, as these characteristics are essential in achieving and sustaining academic excellence. Academic integrity is expected on classroom assignments as well as on summer or supplemental assignments and all assessments.

Cheating at Walton includes but is not limited to the following activities:

• Copying another person’s homework or allowing another person to copy your work
• Looking at and/or copying information from another student’s test/exam/quiz/essay
• Having another person (parent, older sibling, friend, tutor, etc.) complete an assignment or any part of an assignment for you under any circumstances
• Soliciting or sharing assignment or assessment information with other students
• Stealing exams, quizzes, or other assignments from a teacher or classroom either physically or electronically
• Use or possession of stolen tests, materials, etc.
• Submitting a graded or ungraded assignment composed by another person or AI generated at any point in time
• Unauthorized use of study aides, notes, books, data, apps, computer programs, AI, etc. on an assignment
• Sabotaging another student’s work
• Possessing any teacher grading key or teacher text/manual at any time, including electronically
• Unauthorized use or possession of electronics during assessments
• Any type of communication with another student during an assessment period
• Failure to report unauthorized assessment information or answer key in a timely manner to a faculty member.
• Falsifying lab data and/or results

Plagiarism – Plagiarism is the use of passages, materials, words, images and/or ideas that come from someone else without properly naming the source. Examples include, but are not limited to:

• Inappropriate use of AI/Assistive technology***
• Copying someone else’s assignment
• Copying text, images, or other materials from the Internet or other sources without citing them (e.g. PLTW assignments, research papers, essays, etc.)
• Paraphrasing items from a book or article without citing them
• Using translation software to translate sentences or passages
• Using the same sentence structure or thesis as another source without citing it
• If someone or something else has done the work (or any portion of it) for you and you do not acknowledge it.
• Using AI to produce or complete graded or ungraded assignments or assessments

***See your respective course guidelines for AI specific language on what is acceptable/unacceptable usage of AI.

Consequences of Academic Dishonesty:

Consequences for academic dishonesty on homework/classroom assignments are applied at the teacher level. Assignments will receive a grade of zero and a change in conduct grade for the semester. For all other occurrences of academic dishonesty, students will be referred to the appropriate administrator and given a consequence according to the guidelines set below.

Academic dishonesty may result in the permanent removal or ineligibility from honor societies as well as other leadership positions in extracurricular activities, clubs and student government at the club sponsor’s discretion. Academic dishonesty infractions are cumulative. Increased penalties apply.