Academic Code of Conduct

Academic Misconduct

RISD seeks to help its students realize their fullest intellectual, artistic, and personal potential through a distinctive combination of studio and liberal arts courses. The College values the creative process and freedom of expression. The College also honors its responsibility to protect the values and standards of an academic community.

The College recognizes the need for risk-taking and experimentation as integral to a challenging art, design, and liberal arts education. Moreover, the long history of appropriation, subversion, and other means of challenging convention in the arts may, at times, complicate attempts to definitively codify forms of acknowledgement/attribution. That said, forms of experimentation that do challenge these boundaries must at all times adhere to the fundamental value underlying academic conduct at RISD: honesty in the creation and presentation of one’s work as well as in one’s relations to others and their work.

Academic writing must follow conventions of documentation and citation. Others’ ideas—whether quoted directly or paraphrased, whether taken from a book, website, or lecture—must be clearly attributed both to provide a record of the writer’s research and to avoid plagiarism, or presenting another’s ideas as one’s own, including content generated by artificial intelligence. Liberal Arts faculty will often explicitly address documentation expectations, including preferred styles, in class.

In the studio culture, the conventions governing the use and reference to others’ work are less clearly defined than in academic writing. These conventions are often defined by particular disciplinary histories and practices and are best addressed in the context of the particular studio experience. Given the wide variety of disciplinary histories, conventions, traditions, and practices applicable to liberal arts and studio activities, the individual faculty member defines, within reason, what constitutes academic misconduct within the context of a given course.

Code of Student Conduct

The Code of Student Conduct can be viewed here.