Avoiding Plagiarism

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According to The College of St. Scholastica's Academic Honesty Policy located in the Student Handbook,
"Academic dishonesty is defined as follows: Misrepresentation of the work of others as one's own; dishonesty in testing; violating authorized guidelines established by instructors for individual assignments; sabotaging or damaging the work of others; or engaging in dishonesty in other academic work."

Plagiarism and other academic dishonesty includes but is not limited to the following:

Misrepresentation of the work of others as one's own
Using someone else's ideas or words without giving credit
Reusing work from another class without permission
Falsification of data or quotes
Giving or receiving unauthorized help on an assignment or test
Dishonesty in testing
Violating authorized guidelines established by instructors for individual assignments
Sabotaging or damaging the work of others

At The College of St. Scholastica, academic dishonesty can result in failure of an assignment, a course, being denied admission to or dismissed from a department or program, exclusion from extracurricular activities, or expulsion from the College even on the first instance of academic dishonesty.

In order to avoid plagiarizing and its subsequent consequences, check out these tabs, and as always when in doubt, ask your professor or a librarian.

Turnitin is a program that checks the originality of papers. Any papers submitted to this program will be compared to billions of web pages, books, and other papers in its database. Any phrases from the paper that are found in its database are highlighted with the source given showing what was used in the paper and from where.

Instructions for Turnitin for students (pdf)
Instructions for Turnitin for faculty (pdf)
Daily Online Training from Turnitin
FAQs from Turnitin
Handout for faculty on plagiarism (pdf)

The key way to avoid plagiarism is to cite the sources used. When in doubt, cite! For more specific tips mostly from Turnitin's Research Resources, see the following list:

1. Ask the professor follow up questionas about assignment's expecations, group work procedures, take-home tests, WebCT quizzes, etc.
2. Plan your paper; it is never too early to start especially if you will need to inter-library loan sources
3. Print out or photocopy sources as you find them so you have all the information you need for the bibliography
4. Take effective and complete notes from your sources so you can properly cite them
5. When in doubt, always cite the source - even if you got the idea from somewhere else
6. Make it clear who said what when writing your paper
7. Know how to paraphrase or summarize
8. Evaluate your sources - especially web sites for credibility, objectivity and accuracy
9. Write your paper and then don't look at it for at least a day - when you come back to it, any words, phrases, sentences, or ideas that don't seem your own have been borrowed and need to be cited.

The key way to avoid plagiarism is to cite the sources used. When in doubt, cite! For more specific tips mostly from Turnitin's Research Resources, see the following list:

1. Have students sign an Honor Code at the beginning of the semester
2. Have students sign a pledge at the end of the assignment that this is their work "I declare on my honor that I have neither given nor received unauthorized help on this..."
3. Explain what plagiarism means
4. Explain what is wrong about plagiarism
5. Make consequences clear
6. Start off with clear expectations for assigments, group work, resources, etc.
7. Show how to quote and paraphrase with examples
8. Show how to do in-text citations and bibliographies/works cited/references
9. Have students annotate bibliographies
10. Assign oral presentations
11. Have students hand in print outs of their sources
12. Assign a paragraph on the process they took for researching and writing the paper
13. Know what temptations are out there before you create an assignement and adjust accordingly such as having students write on a more recent or lesser known book or topic
14. Maintain your own database of papers by having students submit an electronic copy you can store on your computer
15. Require recent and printed sources
16. Do not allow students to change their topics at the last minute