Academic integrity means making ethical choices in completing your assignments and exams in order to make sure you are being fair to yourself and other students.
It is important that all of the work you submit, including homework and drafts, is work that is your unique creation or properly attributed to the original source. Presenting someone else’s work or ideas as your own without acknowledgement or proper citation is plagiarism.
Your instructors may encourage you to discuss concepts or work with your peers on assignments, and working with others can be very helpful to your learning. However, you should always be mindful of the fact that some assignments may have very strict parameters on how much you can work together, when you can work together, and whether you can work with someone else at all, and this likely will be different for each class you take.
Do not collaborate with other students on assignments or projects unless you have been given explicit permission or instruction to do so. If you are unsure about the extent to which you are allowed to collaborate with someone else, ask your instructor to clarify before it’s too late. You should also ensure that you avoid academic misconduct by reusing work you created for another course without explicit permission to resubmit it.
Many students who end up being investigated for misconduct say that they were unaware that what they were doing was not allowed, e.g. when sharing lines of code with another student for a Computer Science assignment or using an AI tool to (re-)write a paragraph of your literature review. When in doubt, always make sure to ask.
The University's policies on academic integrity and the Code of Student Conduct as well as UC Berkeley Extension's Community Guidelines will apply without exception even if you may not agree with them or are unaware of their existence.
The consequences of academic misconduct can be severe. You could get a failing grade on the assignment, a failing grade in the class, or even be put on probation or dismissed from your program, depending on the severity of the academic misconduct. All violations will be investigated by the Conduct team of the Registrar’s Office.