Teachers serve as role models for their teacher candidates. As a result, community leaders and education professionals have always held teachers to a higher standard of ethical behavior. At Mercer University, exemplary behavior is expected and required of all teacher candidates in all aspects of their course and field experiences. Mercer's teacher candidates should be acutely aware of the serious responsibilities they will assume upon graduation. They should shape their class and field experiences in ways that will best prepare them for their pupils, who will be dependent on the preparation and skill of their teachers.  Additionally, Mercer's teacher candidates are bound by the Georgia Professional Standards Commission Code of Ethics.

Honor Code

Educational institutions have a duty and the corollary disciplinary powers to protect their educational purpose through the setting of standards of scholarship and conduct for the students who attend them. Mercer University fully supports this concept and has established an Honor Policy Committee to investigate, receive testimony, evaluate, and judge cases brought before it by students or faculty members.

Academic integrity at Mercer University is maintained through the Honor System. The Honor System imposes on each student the responsibility for his or her own honest deportment and assumes the corollary responsibility that each one will report any violations of the Honor Code about which he or she has information.

Academic dishonesty includes the following examples, as well as similar conduct aimed at making false representation with respect to academic performance:

1. Cheating on an examination.
   
2. Collaborating with others in work to be presented, contrary to the stated rules of the course.
   
3. Plagiarizing, including the submission of others' ideas or papers, whether purchased, borrowed, or otherwise obtained, as one's own. When direct quotations are used in themes, essays, term papers, tests, book reviews, and other similar work, they must be acknowledged according to the style of documentation appropriate to the discipline.
   
4. Stealing examination or course materials.
   
5. Falsifying records, laboratory results, or other data.
   
6. Submitting, if contrary to the rules of a course, work previously presented in another course.
7. Knowingly and intentionally assisting another student in any of the above, including assistance in an arrangement whereby any work, classroom performance, examination, or other activity is submitted or performed by a person other than the student under whose name the work is submitted or performed.

Any infraction of the Statement of Ethics, the Mercer University Honor Code, and/or the Georgia Professional Code of Ethics may result in dismissal from Mercer University's Teacher Education Program in the Tift College of Education.