ACADEMIC HONOR CODE

Standardized tests required by the State of Georgia are handled by the DOE and students are subject to zeros for misconduct and academic dishonesty.

Philosophy:

As a community focused on learning, Dacula High School strives to maintain an academic environment that embraces academic honesty and integrity. Honesty, responsibility, respect, and integrity are essential components of academic excellence and are ethical principles essential to all areas of student success. Individual student excellence in education must be earned through the honest pursuit of academic knowledge, and individual student achievement must accurately represent the student’s knowledge. The commitment to academic excellence rests upon four pillars: honesty, responsibility, respect, and integrity.

• Honesty, a value that creates an atmosphere of trust within the school community, requires each member of that community to tell the truth and to defend the truth. Adherence to honest values results in fair treatment for each member of the DHS community.
• Responsibility is the quality of being accountable for our actions and accepting the consequences of our actions.
• Respect is demonstrated by treating others with honesty and fairness, showing others the values we ourselves expect. Mutual respect is a cornerstone of academic excellence.
• Integrity is the belief in firm adherence to values both in and out of the presence of others. Academic integrity means that all academic work has been completed within the guidelines set forth for the assignment, thereby providing an accurate portrayal of individual student achievement.

Our focus will be on a culture change. Starting in Dacula Way, students will be introduced to a Dacula Honor Code to be signed at the start of the school year. Teachers school wide will hold students to the code. When students cheat on a major assignment or assessment they will be required to complete work and earn the points based on the following scale:

Consequences:

First Offense: Retake for grade earned, call to parents, & administrative referral submitted (5 Days of LOP)
Second Offense: Retake for up to 70% of earned grade, call to parents, & administrative referral submitted (2 Days of ISS)
Third Offense: Retake for up to 50% of earned credit, call to parents, & administrative referral submitted (2 Days of OSS).

If two cheating incidents occur during a student's’ 11th & 12th grade years, student will be excluded from membership in an Honor Society and/or becoming an Honor Graduate.

Examples of academic dishonesty include, but are not limited to the following:

• Copying/scanning any work or portion of work or turning in any work that belongs to another person.
• Giving or loaning work to another student to be submitted or copied.
• Using papers/reports/projects (including sentences, phrases, paragraphs, or pages from books, websites or other sources) without providing documentation.
• Taking the answers from another student’s paper or using any form of a cheat sheet during any form of assessment.
• Giving information about an assessment to any other student and/or receiving information about an assessment from anyone other than the teacher.
• Use of cell phones during an assessment.
• Possession of any answers (at any time before, during, or after) to a formative or summative assessment
• Transmission of answers via messaging, social media, or any other means.