Commitment to Academic Excellence

The pursuit of Academic Excellence is an important priority at the Community College of Aurora, and we expect all students to demonstrate care and quality in their academic pursuits. Learning how to express original ideas, cite sources, work independently, and share results accurately and honestly are transferable skills for students beyond their academic career.

Maintaining academic excellence involves working with integrity:
• Creating and expressing your own ideas in course work
• Acknowledging and citing all sources of information
• Completing all work independently and/or with approved collaboration
• Sharing results accurately when conducting your own research or working in a laboratory
• Complying with all test and examination expectations and requirements

Behavior that violates academic integrity undermines the pursuit of academic excellence, and includes, but is not limited to:

• Plagiarism. The act of using someone else’s work without giving proper credit to the original source. The work can be expressed, for example, through writing, art, music, language and symbols, media, or a presentation. Reusing your own work without proper citation (or approval of instructor) is also plagiarism.

• Cheating. The act of using or attempting to use an examination or other academic work, material, information, or study aids which are not permitted by the instructor.

Cheating includes, but is not limited to:
•Using books, notes, calculators, or any other electronic devices, or copying from or conversing with others in the completion of academic work (unless such external aids are permitted by the instructor).
• Having someone else do research, author papers, or take examinations for someone else.
• Submitting work completed in one class to fulfill an assignment in another class without prior approval from the instructor(s).
• Contract Cheating: a third party (i.e., GitHub, Dropbox, stack Overflow, Chegg, Quizlet, Clutch, Course Hero) completing a student’s academic work. This can include friends and family completing work for a student or the use of test banks, drop boxes, and/or paid subscription services as well as stealing, distributing, selling, and buying academic work.
• Having someone or an artificial intelligence (AI) tool complete academic work on your behalf.

• Fabrication. The invention of material or its source and its use as an authority in academic work. Fabrication includes, but is not limited to, inventing the data for a scientific experiment; inventing the title and author of a publication in order to use the invented publication as a source; or knowingly attributing material to an incorrect source.

Academic Integrity Process for Students
When there is a potential violation of academic integrity, the student must be provided with due process, a right grounded in the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. This right allows the student to receive notification and to share their perspective with a college representative(s) on the allegation at hand. By doing so, the process for resolving potential violations of academic integrity can be both educational and restorative for the student and the CCA community.

To access the full guideline related to academic integrity, including the process for potential violations of academic integrity for students, please visit
https://ccaurora.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/CCA-Guidelines-06.06.2023.pdf