Donna is a freshman at American Public University, attending full time while maintaining a "normal" life of a full time job and mother of two small children. She and her husband of 10 years have the typical house expenses and work together to complete family chores. She is doing fairly well in her classes (Coll 100, History, Intelligence Studies, and Psychology) but is finding the number of hours in a day is getting shorter and shorter. Her work, although submitted on time, is starting to suffer (in her opinion) due to the lack of time she feels she can spend on school work.
Her friend Deborah shared with her an Internet Site called MyWork.school. When Donna checked it out she found, after a simple search, that it contained a lot of American Public University work submitted by other students. There were forum questions and answers, midterm and final exam questions and answers, and essays. A significant body of work appeared to be at her disposal for many of the classes she knew she would have to take as part of her degree.
In order to have access to all this work Donna would have to either pay a fee or submit her own work to be added to the repository. Donna decided to upload work she completed for her College 100 class: forum questions and her responses, her personal essay, and her final paper.
Please consider and respond to the following:
1. Is Donna acting in violation of the Honor Code, and therefore subject to all punishments outlined, including possible expulsion?
2. Would this be considered plagiarism? Explain your reasoning.
3. If you were Donna's instructor, and discovered this, what would you do?