Academic Integrity and Students with Disabilities


Academic Integrity Statement

Academic Integrity

In order to maintain a culture of academic integrity, members of the University of Waterloo community are expected to promote honesty, trust, fairness, respect and responsibility. Check the Office of Academic Integrity's website for more information.

All members of the UW community are expected to hold to the highest standard of academic integrity in their studies, teaching, and research. This site explains why academic integrity is important and how students can avoid academic misconduct. It also identifies resources available on campus for students and faculty to help achieve academic integrity in — and out — of the classroom.

Grievance

A student who believes that a decision affecting some aspect of his/her university life has been unfair or unreasonable may have grounds for initiating a grievance. Read Policy 70 — Student Petitions and Grievances, Section 4. When in doubt please be certain to contact the department's administrative assistant who will provide further assistance.

Discipline

A student is expected to know what constitutes academic integrity, to avoid committing academic offenses, and to take responsibility for his/her actions. A student who is unsure whether an action constitutes an offense, or who needs help in learning how to avoid offenses (e.g., plagiarism, cheating) or about "rules" for group work/collaboration should seek guidance from the course professor, academic advisor, or the Undergraduate Associate Dean. For information on categories of offenses and types of penalties, students should refer to Policy 71 — Student Discipline. For typical penalties, check Guidelines for the Assessment of Penalties.

Avoiding Academic Offenses

Most students are unaware of the line between acceptable and unacceptable academic behaviour, especially when discussing assignments with classmates and using the work of other students. For information on commonly misunderstood academic offenses and how to avoid them, students should refer to the Faculty of Mathematics Cheating and Student Academic Discipline Policy.

Appeals

A decision made or a penalty imposed under Policy 70, Student Petitions and Grievances (other than a petition) or Policy 71, Student Discipline may be appealed if there is a ground. A student who believes he/she has a ground for an appeal should refer to Policy 72 — Student Appeals.

Note for students with disabilities

AccessAbility Services (formerly the Office for Persons with Disabilities or OPD), located in Needles Hall, Room 1132, collaborates with all academic departments to arrange appropriate accommodations for students with disabilities without compromising the academic integrity of the curriculum. If you require academic accommodations to lessen the impact of your disability, please register with the OPD at the beginning of each academic term.

Inclusion on Course Webpages

The University of Waterloo and the Faculty of Mathematics have requirements for text that must appear on course outlines and/or on course websites. The above text represents a hybrid of the two sets of requirements and should be included somewhere on each course website. The easiest way to do this on the www.student.cs web server is to place the following code in the .shtml file at the point where the statement is to be included:

<!--#include virtual="/~isg/policies/academic_integrity_include"-->

You may also wish to see the above in context in the source file for this page.

If the file is .html rather than .shtml it needs to be renamed to be .shtml. If it is index.html this will not likely pose any problems, but if it is not, links or bookmarks would be broken by the change. In this case a redirect should be installed so that requests for the old .html file will be redirected to the new filename ending in .shtml.

Such a redirect will look something like this:

Redirect permanent /~cs777/directory/file.html http://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs777/directory/file

and should be placed in a world-readable file called .htaccess in the same directory.

For php users, the path to the file needs to reflect its location on the disk. To include this information on a PHP page, you can use an include such as:

<?php include("/u/isg/public_html/policies/academic_integrity_include"); ?>