IB Program

The Academic Integrity Policy

Honesty as a Core Value is what Egyptian American school believes in. The entire school community and stakeholders are not only expected to be honest in the way in which they carry out and present their work or studies, but are also expected to spread our core value of honesty further with families and the local community. Students are expected to be authentic in the way in which they carry out and present their work. This means that all parts of all internal and or external work submitted for assessments must either be original to the student and or must be properly cited.

The Academic Honesty policy must be reviewed annually by IB teachers, librarian, DPC and School Principal. Academic Honesty policy must be a regular topic with the highest priority on all collaborative planning meetings for IB team, including the school Librarian, and for group meetings as well. The academic integrity policy must be communicated to the whole school community and adjustments need to be made age appropriate.

Measures taken to provide education and support

Students will be educated about academic honesty through:

  • Workshops and sessions

    • The librarian is responsible for delivering sessions to students on academic honesty and providing everyday life examples on intellectual rights, patents and trademarks. Different styles of referencing and citation programs that could help students are also presented. These sessions are delivered in the library throughout the year to all age groups.
    • Language teachers are responsible to further consolidate the concept of academic honesty and provide sufficient practice assignments on referencing and citation.
    • Subject teachers guide students and assign a separate criterion and grades for proper referencing and citation for research papers and essays.
    • All teachers dedicate adequate time to address academic honesty in their classes. Guidance and examples are provided throughout the teaching process. Teachers are a key factor in promoting honesty as they share a lot of time with the students and are subject to many incidents in or out of the classroom. Teachers use these daily incidents to enhance discussions, instruction and guidance with an aim to instill academic honesty in students.
    • Session on plagiarism associated with the Extended Essay briefing including an educational session on proper referencing.
    • Library rules and guiding policies all guide students to refrain from misconducts and encourage academic honesty.

  • Resources and reading material for student and parent guidance: ▪

    • Egyptian American School Academic Honesty Policy
    • IB publication: Are you completing your IB assignments honestly?
    • IB publication: Academic Honesty in the IB educational context .
    • IB publication: Effective citing and referencing.

School Community Roles and Responsibilities

Roles and Responsibilities
Student
  • It is the responsibility of the student to produce authentic work of his at all times.
  • To follow the guides, rules and procedures of academic honesty policy
  • Students are expected to advise their peers/or friends on the importance of honesty.
  • Students are encouraged to seek school professional help when in doubt.
  • Make the effort to learn academic writing, research and citation skills
  • Use time management and self-management approaches to avoid delay which is often referred to by students as the reason for them committing an act of plagiarism.
  • Students are responsible to apply honesty in all aspects of their academic school life and all aspects of their personal daily life.
Teacher
  • It is the responsibility of the teacher to train students on how to give credit to other people’s work, like proper citation rules.
  • To teach students what would be considered as misconduct and guide the students on the correct procedures.
  • Teachers consistently implement Honesty. It is a concept that is consistently focused on in classwork, discussions, debates, role plays and activities on the academic side, as well as focused on in everyday life incidents like illegal downloading of computer programs or photocopy of a book. Accordingly, misconduct and its procedures are also addressed.
  • Make the effort to learn and teach students academic writing, research and citation skills.
  • All subject teachers are responsible to ensure that students understand and practice how to properly paraphrase, cite and reference works in different forms such as websites, essays, papers, etc…
  • Foster the students’ self and time management skills to guarantee they hit due dates without struggling
School
  • It is the responsibility of the school to offer a fair, safe environment where students are secure to make their decisions
  • Allow students to make mistakes and correct them on these errors to help them do what is right.
  • Academic honesty and proper citation workshops are delivered to subject teachers by the English Department and the school librarian in the library. These sessions include hands-on workshops on how to cite and reference different types of works.
  • Workshops for students are led by the English Department, the Arabic Department and the librarian.
  • Encourage parents’ involvement in students’ learning and raise the parent’s awareness on academic honesty, misconducts and consequences of infringements in this area.
  • To further ensure fairness, the EAS Integrity Committee will be formed. The committee members will consist of a range of different school stakeholders as principals, teachers and administrators. If a case of misconduct is presented, the Integrity Committee would first meet to discuss the findings. If the student is found guilty of misconduct, then the parents and the student are called in for a meeting to discuss the consequences.
Parents
  • It is the responsibility of the parent to encourage students to give authentic work all the time.
  • Parents can guide students to use resources that the parents can facilitate.
  • Not to help students with school work that only the students are responsible for
  • Their role would also include reading the academic honesty policy together with their son/daughter and offering a safe and cooperative environment when guidance is needed.
  • Practice academic honesty themselves, when necessary, and set the role model for the student.

➢ Academic Dishonesty:

There are a number of common ways in which academic misconduct occurs.

  • Plagiarism

    Plagiarism is defined as the representation, intentionally or unintentionally, of the ideas, words or work of another person without proper, clear and explicit acknowledgment. The IB uses plagiarism detection software to identify when this occurs.

    All candidates for the IB diploma are expected to acknowledge use of the work or ideas of another person in any work (written, oral and/or artistic) they may submit for assessment by using a standard style of referencing.

    If a candidate uses the work or ideas of another person in any form of work that is submitted for assessment, they must acknowledge the source at the point of use (in the body of the text or during the delivery of an oral presentation), using a standard style of referencing, and add the source to the bibliography. This includes direct quotation, paraphrasing or summarizing.

    The IB does not specify which style(s) of referencing or in-text citation should be used by candidates. In EAS , we will use MLA ,(Modern Language Association) style which is the most commonly used to write papers and cite sources. This resource offers examples for the general format of MLA research papers, in-text citations, endnotes/footnotes, and the Works Cited page.

    Failure of a candidate to acknowledge a source will be investigated by the IB as a potential breach of IB regulations. This may result in a penalty being imposed in the subject/component concerned.

  • Collusion

    Candidates are expected to present assessments in their own words and acknowledge the words or ideas of others where collaboration has occurred. While group working is a key element in certain subjects, for example, sciences, collusion occurs when this goes beyond collaboration, for example, when a single (or very similar) version of a report is presented by a number of candidates as their own individual work.

    There are a number of other forms of academic misconduct, these include:

    • duplicating work to meet the requirements of more than one assessment component
    • falsification or inventing fictitious data for an assignment
    • taking unauthorized material into an examination room (this poster provides further details)
    • disruption of an examination by an act of misconduct, such as distracting another candidate or creating a disturbance
    • exchanging, supporting, or attempting to support, the passing on of information that is or could be related to the examination
    • failing to comply with the instructions of the invigilator or other member of the school’s staff responsible for the conduct of the examination
    • impersonating another candidate
    • theft of examination papers
    • use of essay-writing services (ghost-written or purchased essays) offering assistance in writing essays or other assessment materials.

  • How to Avoid Plagiarism

    Plagiarism can be avoided by using the following techniques:

    • Quoting:Placing quotation marks around any passage which is used verbatim and providing a reference to the source
    • Paraphrasing:Integrating other people’s work and ideas into your own work, representing them in your own words, using your own sentence structure and ensuring the original piece of work is acknowledged.
    • Note-taking:Selecting, connecting and organising information in a reduced format using your own words and keeping details of all the sources used.
    • Summarising:Condensing someone’s writing to present a broad picture (but very little detail) whilst acknowledging the source of the information
    • Acknowledging sources:Ensuring that all ideas and works including art, film, dance, music and theater have been referenced.

    Academic honesty provided from the IB publication Academic Honesty Students should take care that:

    Some candidates seem to believe that because the internet is in the public domain and largely uncontrolled, information can be taken from websites without the need for acknowledgement. On the contrary, candidates must record the addresses of all websites from which they obtain information during their research, including the date when each website was accessed. The uniform (or universal) resource locator (URL) constitutes the website address for this purpose. Simply stating the search engine that was used to find the website is not acceptable and does not, in the view of the final award committee, constitute a form of acknowledgment. The requirement to cite the source of material includes the copying of maps, photographs, illustrations, data, graphs and so on. For example, to cut and paste a graph from a website without acknowledging its source constitutes plagiarism. CDRoms, DVDs, email messages and any other electronic media must be treated in the same way as the internet, books and journals.

    The concept of intellectual property is potentially a difficult one for candidates to understand because there are many different forms of intellectual property rights, such as patents, registered designs, trademarks, moral rights and copyright. Candidates must at least be aware that forms of intellectual and creative expression (for example, works of literature, art or music) must be respected and are normally protected by law. By implementing measures to prevent plagiarism schools are helping to combat illegal out-of-school activities (for example, illegal music downloads, peer-to-peer/P2P file sharing) for which candidates may face legal proceedings.

    The distinction between legitimate collaboration and unacceptable collusion or plagiarism: Group work in DP is strongly encouraged and is acceptable. However, there is a huge and clear difference between legitimate collaboration and collusion or plagiarism. Any written work presented must be the original authentic work of each student; one student cannot do the writing for another under any condition

The Use of Turnitin

The school will purchase Turnitin, an online plagiarism checker, and all coursework, the EE and the TOK essay will be tested for plagiarism using this software. The DP coordinator will run this work through Turnitin when it is uploaded to the school systems by the internal deadlines. Teachers will be able to check other assignments through the 2 years using this software

Monitoring and Sanctions

Teachers retain responsibility both for guiding students in the formation of academically honest practices,and for monitoring the work they hand in to ensure it complies with IBDP regulations. To assist students and teachers in understanding the importance of developing and ensuring academic integrity as regards all aspects of the Diploma Programme, internal and external sanctions are in place in order to respond consistently should issues related to academic misconduct arise.

Internal sanctions are those used by EAS,referring to coursework not yet uploaded, and to assignments and classwork which does not count towards the award of the final IB Diploma.

External sanctions are those applied by the IB, and relate specifically to all pieces of work, usually ‘final version’ (internal assessments, final exams, TOK assessment, CAS folders, the EE…) which count towards the final IB Diploma. However, there is some overlap to be expected between the application of these sanctions, so they should not be seen as acting in isolation from each other.

  • Internal Sanctions

    In E AS, we ensure our students gain values as well as knowledge. Plagiarism will not be tolerated under any condition. The student’s general conduct, history and behaviour records, age as well as the severity of the infraction, are all factors that affect the decision made about a guilty student. When deciding on sanctions the school will always take a holistic view of the situation of the student and the gravity of the offence. Integrity committee will be formed to investigate each proven infraction or malpractice; it will decide what actions will be taken in each case.

    • First offense consequences:

      Intervention with the students to correct the behaviour and direct to a remedial action of work redo. Verbal warning will be given and records of the first infraction will be kept in the student file and parents will be informed. The student must be monitored closely to avoid any future misconduct. School librarian will be involved to support the student with guidance and advice on how to avoid such infractions or malpractices.

    • Second offense consequences

      A written warning will be given to the student and a meeting with the parent is required. The student will be asked to repeat it under the school librarian supervision and guidance. A contract will be drawn up by the integrity committee as warning of any coming infractions will result in the cancellation of the work submitted and take Zero.

    • Third offense consequences:

      Integrity committee will decide whether the student will receive a zero on the plagiarized work or where academic misconduct was proved or not. Students will have the right to give their reasons and excuses and accordingly, the committee will give the final decision. Meeting with the parents is a MUST.

    • Fourth offense consequences:

      If the infraction is proven and the committee finds the student guilty, the student will attend a summer course to work on his defects and will be given an internal assessment under the librarian supervision; this only will be with grade 11 students. As for grade 12 students, zero will be given to their submitted work.

  • External Sanctions

    Exte rnal sanctions are those assigned by the IB, or by the school in compliance with IB regulations, and relate specifically to the perception that academic misconduct has taken place in work which counts towards the award of the final Diploma, i.e. coursework (IAs, EE, TOK assessment, oral exams, and more) and final exams.

    As m entioned above, should such misconduct be suspected in the first draft of an IA, the EE or the TOK essay, it is likely that the internal sanctions above will apply. However, if the suspected malpractice occurs at a later stage, either once work has been submitted to the IB, or when final versions of IAs are handed in after internal deadlines, with little or no time before the final IB submission date, misconduct investigation and sanctions will take place as detailed in the section below.

    The school retains the right to apply other sanctions when dealing with malpractice internally including internal exams, tests, coursework (internal assessments) and homework procedures. When the misconduct involves official IB examination procedures, these sanctions could also be enlarged to include suspension, expulsion, refusal to allow the student to attend the IB exam reception, the graduation ceremony, or the like.

Student academic misconduct

  • Investigation flowchart

    POP will be implemented for the students coming from non-IB system.

    • Possible student academic misconduct is reported to identify by the IB
    Investigation is initiated work of candidate is checked
    Is there enough evidence to justify an investigation?
    Yes
    School is informed regarding the case and required to collect statment from all parties involved
    Collected information evidence is presented to the IB panel for a descion
    Decision communicated to the head of school and the programme coordinator
    End

  • Penalty matrices

    This section contains the IB penalty matrices detailing infringements by the student and the level of penalty which may be applied by the IB.

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