APA style and citations for dummies - Joe Giampalmi 2021

Academic integrity: get your sheepskin
Protecting scholarship: plagiarism
Conforming to standards: APA and the academic environment

In this chapter

Earning the sheepskin with integrity

Pledging against plagiarism

Fulfilling responsibilities

Colliding cultures

I enjoy science and don’t usually miss an opportunity to attend a science lecture on campus. I recently attended a lecture about landmark scientific discoveries and heard stories about scientific achievements such as the following:

· Invention of the light bulb, and America’s greatest inventor

· Development of more than 300 uses of the peanut

· Creation of the assembly line and the Model T

· A Nobel Prize in physics and chemistry

The scientists credited with these discoveries represented legends in their field: Toni Grogan, Jason Culbert, Rex Miles, and Eric Huber. Don’t recognize these legends? Without policies of academic integrity and plagiarism requiring attribution of sources, you may never have heard of the actual owners of the rights to these discoveries — Thomas Edison, George Washington Carver, Henry Ford, and Marie Curie.

When you think plagiarism, think of protecting Edison’s intellectual ownership of the light bulb and other inventions. And if you write a book, remember that you’re entitled to the intellectual properties associated with that book.

In this chapter, I explain your responsibilities of avoiding plagiarism and protecting intellectual ownership by not misrepresenting the works of others. I also explain academic integrity and cultural conflicts resulting from differences between Western and Eastern beliefs about intellectual properties.

Academic Integrity: get your sheepskin

A banking system is based on the financial reserve behind the currency it circulates. A system of higher learning is based on the academic integrity behind the students it serves and the diplomas it awards. Academic integrity is built on the principle that degrees are earned honestly and fairly, not earned falsely and awarded indiscriminately.

As I discuss in the following sections, students, faculty, and administration share responsibility protecting scholarship by understanding academic integrity, defending threats of academic breeches, and responding to trending research in academic plagiarism.

Defining academic integrity

Academic integrity, the foundation of a university’s beliefs, advocates for the elimination of academic dishonesty and ensures that degrees are earned honestly through the fair exchange of intellectual properties. University policies enforce the quest for knowledge, based on the principles of honesty, commitment, responsibility, fairness, and respect — obligations of all shareholders.

Students’ contribution to academic integrity includes a commitment to learning and satisfying curiosity and honestly and fairly creating meaning from classroom content. Students commit to learn within the guardrails of academic honesty.

Students and faculty provide frontline protection against academic dishonesty by championing honest academic performance. Academic protection needs a voice on campus as an uncompromising value. Academic integrity results from respecting ideas of experts in research and ideas of others in the classroom, especially when those ideas are unpopular.

Faculty contributions include aligning academic policy with syllabi and assignments, proactively discouraging plagiarism throughout the course, and creating an interesting classroom environment and assignments that challenge students to perform at maximum intellectual levels. Faculty commitment includes utilizing plagiarism-detection software and other resources provided to them to monitor academic honesty.

All shareholders need to ensure that assignments show students’ own thinking. Student expectations far exceed merely crediting sources to avoid plagiarism. They also include demonstrating thinking that aligns with the experts being credited.

Student violations of academic codes fracture the value of individual degrees and frequently result in life-altering consequences such as dismissal from school. Violations of academic codes, though fortunately infrequent, negatively affect all degree holders of a university. When you occasionally see news stories of systemic institutional dishonesty, you question the integrity of every degree holder from that university. Dishonesty is the enemy of teaching and learning.

Imagine an academic institution where fairness isn’t enforced, assignments aren’t students’ own work, faculty don’t enforce policy, and integrity isn’t valued. You can imagine that degrees aren’t valued in that kind of setting.

Diplomas in the Middle Ages were composed of sheepskin, literally the hide of sheep, because of their durability when academicians carried degrees with them. More recently, selling sheepskin diplomas was a thriving business of a New York retailer. Today, a few prestigious universities continue to award sheepskin; they aren’t the diploma of choice among vegetarians.

Looking at the research

Current research on academic plagiarism shows a disturbing trend of increasing violations and acceptance of dishonesty among college and high school students. The research shows behaviors by college and high school students that threaten the value of a college degree and college education. The ripple effect could include employers devaluing the academic integrity of universities that neglect to defend their academic process.

Here’s a look at what the research shows for the groups studied:

· More than half of high school students reported cheating on a test at least once in the past year, and a third reported cheating at least twice.

· A third of high school students reported plagiarizing on an assignment using an online source.

· A third of college students reported paraphrasing and summarizing without crediting a source.

· Almost half of students believed that their instructors sometimes intentionally avoided reporting plagiarism.

· A small percentage of undergraduate students reported fabricating sources, buying a paper online, and paying someone to write a paper.

· Two-thirds of college students said they cheated at least once every academic semester.

But the good news is that plagiarism decreased in classrooms where it was discussed prior to beginning assignments.