On the Front of Every Paper You Turn In, I Would Like You to Type and Sign the Following

HONOR CODE

On the front of every paper you turn in, I would like you to type and sign the following statement:

On my honor I affirm that the thinking and writing in this paper is my own, and that I have properly cited every source, including websites, quoted or referenced.

What is plagiarism?

Education is about learning from others, and the best papers often rely heavily on ideas that have been forwarded by other scholars and writers. But plagiarism is different from research. It occurs whenever a student represents someone else’s ideas or writing as his or her own. Essentially it is an intellectual fraud, producing a situation in which I am evaluating work done by a person other than the student I imagine I am evaluating.

An invigorating exchange of ideas in a conversation or study group, later incorporated into one’s writing, does not constitute plagiarism – indeed it is a hoped-for result of a good college experience. But shared writing – that is, writing with ideas and phrases repeated in more than one student’s paper in the same or very similar ways – does constitute plagiarism. So does cutting and pasting (or barely paraphrasing) from a book, article, or website without citing it. Both of these are plagiarism because they use ideas other than your own without acknowledgement.

I take the increasing incidence of plagiarism and cheating very seriously, and treat it with great severity when I discover it, which isn’t that difficult to do. The best way to avoid plagiarism is simply to cite every specific source that you have quoted (that is, whose language you have copied), or to which you have referred for ideas that are not generally known and accepted. THIS INCLUDES ANY INFORMATION YOU TAKE FROM THE INTERNET. Be careful: pasting information from a web source into a word-processing file does not make it your own.

My goal is to help you learn how to think for and express yourself, as well as you can. That is the skill and wisdom you will take away from your years here, and it is the very skill most compromised by intellectual dishonesty.