Academic integrity in this course:
Academic integrity means, simply, honesty in how one conducts oneself in academia. Violations of academic integrity undermine the trust on which an intellectual community is built, and so threaten our ability to carry on with the normal activities of the university: research, teaching, and learning.
Just as none of us would not normally misrepresent ourselves, steal or cheat in day-to-day life outside the university, so also we should behave with integrity within the university. Sounds simple enough & commonsensical, doesn’t it? In theory, it should be. But what has gradually become clear to me over the past few years is that the current generation of students may often have genuine difficulty telling what is and isn’t legitimate practice in academia. Some highschools apparently tolerate, maybe even encourage, ‘learning’ by downloading materials off the Web and presenting them as one’s own work. Such practice is plagiarism. Tweaking of downloaded materials (e.g., changing the wording slightly to your own style) doesn’t change the fact that they are somebody else’s intellectual property, and may in fact make the offence worse by making detection of plagiarism more difficult.
When you consult online resources, be extremely wary of simply copying & pasting from them. Do so sparingly, and always treat such copied passages as you would treat a quotation from a printed source (i.e., put it in inverted commas, provide a full reference, etc.). If you consult online resources without quoting from them directly, you should still acknowledge them in your references (as you should do with printed sources you read).
Remember that plagiarism is the most serious infraction of academic integrity, but not the only one: cheating on exams, providing false information, etc., are all forbidden. If it feels like cheating, it probably is. (And if you're not sure, always err on the side of caution.)
I have zero tolerance for violations of academic integrity.
Some helpful online resources include: Cornell’s brand new Practical Guide to the Code of Academic Integrity. An online tutorial on Recognizing and Avoiding Plagiarism (which you should take!) . A helpful quiz from the University of East Anglia. (You may be interested in some comments provoked by this quiz.) And, on the right, "A Plagiarism Carol" comes to you direct from the University in Bergen, Norway (with thanks to Eliza Buhrer for shepherding it on its journey). There is a moral to this fable. |
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Oren Falk, Associate Professor
Department of History, Cornell University
Page last updated on: 26 August, 2010