An academic community must operate with complete openness, honesty and integrity. Responsibility for maintaining this atmosphere lies with the students, faculty and administration. Therefore, the achievement of personal and academic goals through dishonest means will not be tolerated.

Academic misconduct includes but is not limited to:

• Cheating: the unauthorized use or exchange of information before or during a quiz, test, or semester examination. Unauthorized collaboration on a class assignment, submitting the same work in two courses without the professor’s permission, and buying or selling work for a course are also forms of cheating.
• Plagiarism: the representation of words or ideas as one’s own. The various forms of plagiarism include but are not limited to copying homework, falsifying lab reports, submitting papers containing material written by another person, and failing to document in one’s written assignment words secured from publications.
• Providing or receiving assistance in a manner not authorized by the professor in the creation of work to be submitted for academic evaluation including papers, projects and examinations; presenting as one’s own the ideas or words of another for academic evaluation without proper acknowledgement.
• Doing unauthorized academic work for which another person will receive credit or be evaluated.
• Attempting to influence one’s academic evaluation by means other than academic achievement or merit.
• Misconduct assistance: cooperation with another in an act of academic misconduct. A student who writes a paper or does an assignment for another student is an accomplice and will be held accountable just as severely as the other. Any student who knowingly permits another to copy from his or her own paper, examination, or project shall be held as accountable as the student who submits the copied material.

Penalties for Academic Misconduct
Penalties for any infraction are cumulative in that they are imposed in light of a student’s record at Mount St. Mary’s. The minimum penalty for the first offense will be a grade of zero for the assignment or examination; an instructor may impose a more severe penalty if circumstances warrant it. A second offense will result in a semester grade of failure (F) for the course in which this second incident occurs. The penalty for the third offense may be expulsion from the university.

Graduate Appeals Procedure
Students may appeal charges of academic misconduct, and they may appeal a final course grade. An appeal of a charge regarding academic integrity may be made if the student disputes the charge. A course grade appeal may be submitted only on the grounds that a grading policy is either unclear or has been unfairly applied.

In either case, recourse should be made first to the professor concerned, and then to the program director (i.e., MBA, Education, MALS). A student wishing to pursue the matter further must register a written appeal with the department chair (program director in the case of MALS) no later than the fourth week of the session following the posting of the grade or the plagiarism charge. After receiving an appeal, the department chair will ask the chair of the Graduate Academic Committee (GAC)  to convene the Graduate Appeals Board, a standing subcommittee of the GAC. This board consists of two graduate students, two faculty members and the chair of the GAC. Both student and fauclty membership are appointed by the chair of the GAC for the period running June 1 -- May 31. Only three members of the Graduate Appeals Board are required to hear an appeal (one graduate student, one faculty member and the chair of the GAC). Once the chair of the GAC is asked to convene the Graduate Appeals Board, the board has 60 days to determine if an appeal is warranted.

Once the Graduate Appeals Board is convened, a simple majority vote of the board will determine whether an appeal is warranted. If the board decides to hear an appeal, it may invite testimony from the student and/or the faculty member involved in the case and may, at its discretion, solicit other pertinent information. Decisions in appeals hearings will be made by majority vote. Once the board determines that an appeal is warranted, it has 90 days to render a final decision. If this deadline is not met, the appeal will go automatically to the dean for academic affairs for a final decision.

The board's decision may be appealed to the dean for academic affairs. The dean for academic affairs' decision is final. Both the department chair and the Graduate Appeals Board are responsible for ensuring that the process is followed correctly and that all evidence is examined thoroughly, confidentially and in as timely a fashion as reasonably possible (this ordinarily means no later than the end of the semester following the semester in which the appeal was initiated).

Professor (Negotiation) -> Program Director (Mediation) -> Department Chair (Formal Documentation) -> Graduate Appeals Board (Decision) -> Dean for Academic Affairs (Appeal/Final Decision)