Graduate Independent Study - Academic Integrity
Please read this page carefully! Do NOT assume you know what it says!
The integrity of the work you submit for your Independent Study project will be held to the highest standards. It is your responsibility to understand what is and what is not acceptable concerning the content of your work and the use of previous work. When in doubt, consult your advisor!
Please visit and study the material on the university's Academic Integrity Gateway. Familiarize yourself with both the Academic Integrity Code and the Academic Integrity Policy. Be sure to take the interactive quiz before leaving the site. You should also review the department academic integrity page.
An Independent Study project requires that you integrate and synthesize information from various sources. We don't expect every idea in your work to be your own. But we do require that you give credit where credit is due.
It is important that you and your advisor have a clear understanding of the goals of the project relative to the use of previous work. Sometimes the primary goal of a project is to investigate and report on the work of other people. In other cases, previous work is the springboard from which you launch your own efforts. Discuss this balance carefully with your advisor.
For an Independent Study project, academic integrity issues include the following:
- In your final report you must cite any source of information that contributes to the work performed for your project, and you must list the full reference in the bibliography.
- You must identify any words taken directly from previous work as a quotation. This may be accomplished using quotation marks or by indenting the quotation, with the surrounding text clearly indicating that those words are taken from another source. You should minimize your use of direct quotes. In general, you should integrate information into the running flow of your report, expressed in your own words. That synthesis is part of the learning process. Note that even when you express the ideas in your own words, you must cite the original source of the information.
- Any software written as part of your Independent Study project must be your own work, or must be clearly identified as someone else's work in both the online documentation of the source code and in the Independent Study final report.
Unfortunately, we've had a few students in the past violate the principles of academic integrity during their Independent Study project work. In these cases the students received a failing grade for the course and we have submitted them for disciplinary action at the university level. We take academic integrity very seriously. You should as well.