APA style and citations for dummies - Joe Giampalmi 2021

Plagiarism and academic dishonesty: you know better
Protecting scholarship: plagiarism
Conforming to standards: APA and the academic environment

You as a student know the problem of plagiarism better than I do as a professor. I know it from the violations level, and you know it from the application level. You and I both know that the academic climate today expects high-level performance at record-breaking speed. But while producing your best work, you and I want to ensure that it’s your own work, that you’re proud of it, and that you feel good about it — and your mother would be proud to post it on the refrigerator door.

Academic dishonesty today reveals many shades of gray. The following sections look at some of the major classifications.

Cheating

Overt cheating includes borrowing, buying, or downloading third-party papers. It includes practices such as using past course papers and materials the professor didn’t authorize for general assignment use. Cheating also includes talking with someone who just took a test you’re scheduled to take, as well as looking at an unauthorized past assignment. Cheating erodes the value of academic achievement and the value of academic degrees.

Self-plagiarism

Self-plagiarism includes referencing a paper you wrote for another assignment or another course. In some circumstances, referencing your own paper may be appropriate with the explicit approval of your professor. Even with professor approval, a self-written paper may result in plagiarism issues that you don’t want to get involved with. Students may self-plagiarize as a shortcut to starting a new assignment.

A safer and better academic practice is to begin papers and projects with original ideas.

Patchwriting

An academically dishonest practice expedited by technology includes patchwriting, or changing a few key words within a pasted paragraph. Patchwriting refocuses the purpose of reading and writing and is easily detected by plagiarism-detection software. Paraphrasing and citing require less effort than patchwriting and are more effective — and honest.

Conflicts of interest

A subtle form of academic dishonesty includes referencing sources in which the author has a financial interest in the research results — for example, a researcher’s findings showing the effectiveness of a product when the researcher has a financial interest in that product. APA requires authors to also disclose conflicts of interest in an author note on the title page (see Chapter 14). You as an undergraduate should reveal conflicts of interest, for example, in an essay promoting the value of team sports if you’re an athlete.

Unauthorized collaboration

Professors usually clarify acceptable and unacceptable collaboration associated with assignments. Unauthorized collaboration includes working on an assignment with another person without the professor’s approval such as collaborating with another student, another professor, or an expert in the field. Team assignments clearly permit collaboration among team members. Other types of assignment collaboration require clear authorization by the professor. Ask about collaboration at the start of the assignment.

Falsification

Forms of academic misrepresentation include fabricating survey results, falsifying research, creating fictitious references, and intentionally misspelling an author’s name or source. Each example discredits the integrity of the author’s work.

A professor’s perspective on plagiarism

I trust my students, but I’m not naïve. I don’t look forward to student plagiarism issues any more than students do, but I accept ethical and legal responsibilities to enforce university codes of academic integrity. The process of investigating plagiarism is time consuming for faculty, but necessary to enforce academic integrity. I don’t want to teach at an institution that compromises academic honesty.

When I read and grade assignments, plagiarism is listed on my mental rubric. If I see an initial plagiarism concern as I read papers, such as an inadequate citation or a complete lack of citation, I read for additional plagiarism indicators such as lack of coordination between citations and reference items (see Chapter 10). If I determine an indication of patterns, I schedule a student conference to raise my concerns and listen to the student’s explanation. I ask the student to bring research notes to the conference. I run the paper through sophisticated plagiarism-detection software that the university provides for faculty. I also select four consecutive words uncommon to the student’s prior writing and run an online search.

If my concerns remain following the student conference, I meet with my department chair to discuss the issues and continue to follow university procedures for plagiarism. After meeting with the department chair, the issue either ends or my concerns are presented to the Provost office and eventually the university review board.

I accept my obligation to regularly redesign assignments and create assignments with unique approaches that discourage plagiarism. I also recognize my responsibility to discuss academic honesty with every assignment and clarify assignment practices that are authorized or unauthorized.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism includes misrepresenting works of others as your own, whether intended or unintended. Examples of dishonest academic practices include

· Lack of citing a summary, paraphrase, or quotation

· Misidentifying an author’s name

· Neglecting attribution of ideas

· Neglecting quotation marks enclosing direct words

· Misidentifying common knowledge (see Chapter 10)

· Fabricating citations and references

The danger of plagiarism is that it stops the learning process and starts the detection-avoidance process. Student energy becomes focused on “looking like I’m smart, but not too smart.” Students lose an opportunity to research, write, and cite. They also lose the skill of reading for the purpose of developing a thesis; they read for the purpose of identifying content they can plagiarize without getting caught.

On a larger scale, plagiarism contributes to the devaluation of a university and a degree. Imagine how worthless a degree and university can become when plagiarism becomes common practice.