Wake Forest University’s Graduate Student Academic Honor Code defines plagiarism as a type of cheating that includes: (a) the use, by paraphrase or direct quotation, of the published or unpublished work of another person without complete acknowledgment of the source; (b) the unacknowledged use of materials prepared by another agency or person providing term papers or other academic materials; (c) the non-attributed use of any portion of a computer algorithm or data file; or (d) the use, by paraphrase or direct quotation, of online material without complete acknowledgment of the source.
Students are admitted to Wake Forest University School of Divinity because they possess the intelligence, talent, and creative capacity to develop their own ideas, find their own voices, and express themselves in their own words. Theological education at the School of Divinity is designed to empower you in this process of intellectual and vocational formation, which takes place in conversation with many interlocutors, but which should result in the development of your own authentic capacities for constructive theological reflection and religious leadership. Therefore, it is important that you exercise care in distinguishing your own ideas and voice from the ideas and voices of others.
To put your name on a piece of work is to say that it is yours, and that the praise or criticism due to it is due to you. To put your name on a piece of work any part of which is not yours is plagiarism unless that piece is clearly marked and the work from which you have borrowed is fully identified. Plagiarism derived from human authorship is a form of theft. Taking words, phrasing, sentence structure, or any other element of the expression of another person’s ideas, and using them as if they were yours, is like taking from that person a material possession, something that person has worked for and earned. Even worse is the appropriation of someone else’s ideas. "Ideas" mean everything from the definition or interpretation of a single word to the overall approach or argument. If you paraphrase, you merely translate from the person's language to yours; another person’s ideas in your language are still not your ideas. Paraphrase, therefore, without proper documentation, is a form of theft in which a person loses not a material possession, but something of that person’s own creative initiative.
The use of generative-AI to fulfill academic requirements constitutes another form of plagiarism when such use violates AI policies stated in an instructor’s course syllabus and/or passes off AI-generated material as a student’s own work without citation.
If students wish to do one project for two courses or to draw on work previously done in order to complete an assignment for a current course, they must get the expressed permission of all affected faculty in advance of turning in the assignment. The faculty suggests that approved combined projects should represent significantly more effort than the individual projects they supplanted.
Plagiarism derived from human authorship is a serious violation of another person’s rights and a student’s own human creativity, whether the material stolen is great or small; it is not a matter of degree or intent. Unauthorized and unattributed use of generative-AI similarly is an act of academic dishonesty, and this truncates a student’s intellectual development and vocational integrity. You know how much you would have had to say without someone else’s help, and you know how much you have added on your own. Your responsibility, when you put your name on a piece of work, is simply to distinguish between what is yours and what is not, and to credit those persons or technologies that have in any way contributed.
An online plagiarism tutorial is available here through Wake Forest University's ZSR Library. An online guide to the Chicago Style of referencing works is available here.