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Academic Honesty and Plagiarism
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Ursinus College Statement on Plagiarism
- Plagiarism is the act of taking the words, written or spoken, or the ideas of someone
else and passing them off as one's own.
- You are plagiarizing if you copy exactly a
statement by another and fail to identify your source.
- You are plagiarizing if you take
notes from a book, an article or a lecture, express those materials in your own words, and
present the result as your work without identifying your source.
- You are plagiarizing if
you copy part or all of a paper written by a friend, another student, or a writing service
and offer it as your own work.
- You are plagiarizing if you take material verbatim from a
source (even though the source is acknowledged) without identifying it as quoted material
by means of quotation marks.
- Plagiarism is dishonest, risky, and stupid. It is dishonest
because it is stealing what belongs to another without acknowledging his ownership, and it
is lying by pretending that it is your own. It is risky because it invites a scale of
penalties from a failing grade in a particular assignment to dismissal from the college.
It is stupid because it means that one has not only stolen credit from one's fellows, but
discarded a chance to learn working methods and materials meant to be a useful part of
college education.
- Plagiarism is easy to avoid by using common sense and following the
advice and directions for acknowledging sources. Such forms and methods are available from
teachers and style sheets provided by departments as well as by any composition textbook.
Never take notes verbatim or in your own words without using appropriate quotation marks
and noting exact sources, including page numbers of the material. It is the policy of
Ursinus College to reject and to punish the act of plagiarism.
(The above has been adapted from, and credit is given to, Millward, Handbook for
Writers, pp. 354-355.)
Adopted by the Faculty January 21, 1981
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Specific Examples from Student Handbook
- Copy answers or use information from a fellow student's paper during
a quiz, test, or examination.
- Divulge answers or information, or otherwise give improper aid to
another student during a quiz, test, or examination or accept such
aid.
- Relay or receive any improperly obtained or confidential information
concerning a quiz, test, or examination. (Example: if one sees the
test before it is to be given and transmits information concerning its
contents or whereabouts to other students.)
- Use or refer to any unauthorized notes, books, calculators, problem
solving aids such as "cheat sheets" during a quiz, test, or
examination.
- Collaborate improperly with another student on an open-book or
take-home quiz, test or examination; or obtain information from an
unsuspecting fellow student during such an exercise.
- As a proctor or student assistant, divulge confidential information
or aid any student in an improper manner during a laboratory exercise,
quiz, test, or examination.
- Commit an act of plagiarism in any form.
- Borrow under false pretenses, steal or otherwise improperly obtain
lecture or research notes, laboratory data, or any information
gathered by another student and present it as your own work (examples:
term papers; laboratory reports or experimental yields; computer
programs or assignments; English composition themes), or knowingly
collaborate with another student by making such material available to
him/her.
- Falsify laboratory data, notes, results, or research data of any
type in any course and present it as your own work.
- Steal or intentionally damage or destroy notes, research data,
laboratory projects, library materials, computer software (including
the intentional passing of a computer virus), or any other work of
another student (or faculty member), out of malice, or for the purpose
of sabotaging that person's work and thereby gaining an unfair
advantage to yourself.
- Knowingly and willingly violate any special rules concerning
research procedures, group assignments, or inter-student collaboration
which may be established by an instructor in any course.
- Submit the same work including oral presentations for different
courses without the permission of the instructors involved. Since it
is expected that different courses offer different learning
experiences, students are depriving themselves of an educational
opportunity by submitting the same or similar work for more than one
course. Examples include but are not limited to submitting a partial
or complete paper previously handed into another class, superficially
reworking one assignment for submissions to another class. (Example:
submitting a sociology paper as an English 100 paper.)
- Misrepresent yourself to an instructor or an administrator for the
purpose of gaining special favors or extensions for academic work
missed. Examples include but are not limited to lying about your
health or the health of a relative, forging doctor's notes
- Forge signatures on forms, documents, or letters pertinent to
College business. This may include but is not limited to course of
study sheets, drop/add forms, or doctor's notes.
You are an accessory to cheating, and penalties may be applied, if
you:
- Witness or have direct knowledge of any of the aforementioned forms
of cheating and fail to inform an authorized person (faculty member,
administrator, proctor. or student assistant).
- You bring unauthorized materials into a testing area and fail to or
refuse to remove them when instructed to do so.
- You fail to or refuse to comply with admonitions from a faculty
member or authorized proctor to cease any activity, which might aid
other students in cheating.
(From the Ursinus College Student Handbook 2001-2002, pp. 9-10.)
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Quizzes and Tutorials from other Institutions
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Are you Playing 'Games of Chance' with your Academic Career? (University
of Manitoba)
- Presents a series of questions about scenarios involving
academic honesty. Answer key is provided.
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Plagiarism:
What It is and How to Recognize and Avoid It (Indiana University)
- Describes how to paraphrase correctly and explains the concept
of "common knowledge."
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- How
Not to Plagiarize (University of Toronto)
- This page answers a series
of questions concerning what types of information must be cited.
Academic
Honesty and Intellectual Ownership (University of Puget Sound)
- Includes pages on intellectual ownership, recognizing plagiarism,
standard of originality, standard of common knowledge, and avoiding
plagiarism.
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Citation Style Guides
Material in research papers comes largely from the work of others. To
avoid plagiarism it is necessary to give
proper credit to the original source. Below are links to two commonly used citation
styles. If you are unsure of which to use, check with your course instructor.
These guides are also available as paper handouts in the Library.
 APA Style- based on the guide used by the American Psychological Association
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MLA Style
- based on the guide used by the Modern Language Association of America
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Chicago Style
- based on the Chicago Manual of Style
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