Plagiarism
- All work submitted for credit in any class must be the product of the individual student's own original thoughts supported and informed by appropriately documented and credited sources.
- Plagiarism is the use of someone else's words, ideas, pictures, design, and/or intellectual property without the correct documentation and punctuation.
- Plagiarism takes many forms: for example, turning in the same essay for two different courses is considered self-plagiarism and will result in a zero for the paper. You may legitimately wonder how anyone would ever know; this is one of the purposes of the SafeAssign plagiarism scan.
Plagiarism is morally indefensible. Any assignment showing signs of plagiarism, either the:
- Deliberate cut-and-paste of online or print sources
- Recycling of essays from previous classes
- Essays written on behalf of the student by family members or friends, or third parties, such as professional essay writing services
- The result of inattention and incompetence
- Paraphrasing large sections based on the ideas of another source...even if you put it into your own words will be graded zero. A second offense will result in an appointment with the dean of the Arts and Humanities Department.
How to Avoid Plagiarism
- Here is a good rule: It is better to be safe than sorry in academic writing. Always cite your sources. A person's ideas are their intellectual property. You wouldn't go into another student's backpack and steal their property. Plagiarism is stealing the ideas of another person and passing them off as your own without giving them credit.
- This includes paraphrasing or summarizing, as well as cut and paste.
- Cutting and pasting large sections of text, even when you cite your sources, does not represent college level, original writing.
- If you have to look something up for your paper, cite your sources in text, and in your works cited page.
- Even if you summarize, give the author of the ideas credit.