Plagiarism or cheating usually involves an attempt to appear to have more knowledge or skill than one actually possesses, and as such constitutes academic dishonesty. Dallas Theological Seminary as an institution committed to academic fairness and integrity, will grade all academic work in the fairest way possible to ensure that the work is in fact the student’s own personal academic work.
Plagiarism occurs in research whenever a writer appropriates material that falls outside the sphere of common knowledge and is from any source not his own without indicating his or her indebtedness to that source. The theft may have to do with substance (i.e., ideas or information taken from a source without acknowledgment in the form of proper documentation), or it may have to do with verbal expression (i.e., wording or phraseology taken from a source without acknowledgment in the form of proper documentation and quotation marks around the quoted material), or using text written by a generation system as one’s own (e.g., entering a prompt into an artificial intelligence tool and using the output in a paper).
In either of these forms, plagiarism constitutes a serious academic and ethical impropriety. For this reason any work submitted that gives clear evidence of plagiarism, whether committed deliberately or naively, will receive a grade of zero.
Each case will be reported to the Dean of Students. Depending on the circumstances, the student may be subject to additional disciplinary action.
Cheating involves dishonest or deceptive attempts to gain credit for academic work through the use of notes, aids, computer tools, or the help of other students in ways expressly prohibited by the instructor.
Students are expected to complete all exams, including those that are not proctored, with honor and integrity. Professors may require students to agree to an integrity statement upon taking an exam. Violations of the integrity and honor code may be reported to the Dean of Students as determined by the professor.
