Introduction
The following statement is the University of Notre Dame’s Undergraduate Academic Code of Honor. Below it, you will also find a Procedural Appendix, which identifies the mechanisms and personnel responsible for implementing, supporting, and ensuring adherence to the Honor Code.
Undergraduate Academic Code of Honor
As members of an academic and spiritual community, students, faculty, and staff at the University of Notre Dame are engaged in a collaborative educational endeavor. Together, we work to create, “an environment of teaching and learning that fosters the development in its students of those disciplined habits of mind, body, and spirit that characterize educated, skilled, and free human beings.” Therefore, all members of the University community are expected to embrace and adhere to the following pledge:
As a member of the Notre Dame community, I acknowledge that it is my responsibility to learn and abide by principles of intellectual honesty and academic integrity, and therefore I will not participate in or tolerate academic dishonesty.
Together, we share responsibility for developing and maintaining a culture of integrity that infuses all aspects of undergraduate life. We are responsible for ensuring honorable behavior in all academic endeavors. For example, work for undergraduate classes, whether graded or ungraded, is expected to conform to the standards articulated within course syllabi. As a general rule, tests and other assessments should reflect a student’s own effort unless otherwise approved by course instructors. Essays and research papers submitted for formal evaluation must utilize class-specific citation conventions. Home assignments and collaborative projects are also to be completed in a manner consistent with directions given by those teaching individual classes. Faculty members are also expected to explain, and students will be responsible for conforming to, disciplinary conventions relative to the proper usage of all source materials.
Students, faculty, and staff serve as stewards of this Honor Code and are enjoined to take proactive steps in assuring that an undergraduate culture of integrity is maintained within and beyond the classroom. Such actions include promoting among peers an awareness of our mutual responsibilities to one another under this Honor Code and undertaking those “responsible actions” outlined in its “Procedural Appendix,” should any member of our community become aware of a potential violation thereof. Administration of this Honor Code and handling of alleged infractions are conducted in a manner consistent with restorative justice practices and Catholic Social Thought, especially the principles of human dignity and care for the common good. Whenever possible, individual cases are resolved by recourse to either an abbreviated process—the Honor Code Violation Report (HCVR)—or via protocols overseen by the chairs of college- and school-specific Honor Code committees. Outcomes of and penalties resulting from Honor Code violations are treated as part of the undergraduate educative process.
In sum, our collective mission involves nurturing a sense of moral responsibility on the part of all involved in the teaching and learning enterprise, as well as fostering ideals—academic integrity in particular—reflective of those virtues at the heart of higher education in the Catholic tradition.