is the most serious academic offense, because it is both theft and lying. If you pass off someone else’s ideas or words as your own without proper acknowledgment, you are: 1) robbing the original author of proper credit for his or her creative work (would you like someone doing that to you?), and 2) failing to do the minimum mental work necessary to learn something for yourself — which means you are pretending to understand something that you don’t (would you like to fly in an airplane piloted by someone whose only training in flight school was buying term papers on air safety off the Internet?). Incidents of plagiarism will receive an automatic F and may be reported to the College authorities, who have the authority to assess further penalties.