Rowan Cabarrus Community College Academic Integrity at Franklin University Discussion

Description

Purpose

This assignment will help you:

  • Define plagiarism.
  • Discuss tools, resources, and strategies that are available to help prevent plagiarism.
  • Submit a paper to, and retrieve feedback from, Turnitin.

Overview

This assignment will familiarize you with the University’s policy regarding Academic Integrity and how it relates specifically to plagiarism. It will also introduce you to Turnitin, a tool used by the University to assist faculty and students to ensure that sources are properly cited. You will submit the first draft of your paper, and during this process it will be automatically checked by Turnitin. You’ll receive a report back, make any revisions as needed based on the feedback, and then re-submit your paper for grading.

Plagiarism

plagiarism (noun):

  1. A piece of writing that has been copied from someone else and is presented as being your own work.
  2. The act of plagiarizing; taking someone’s words or ideas as if they were your own.

From this definition of plagiarism, it is quite evident why it cannot be tolerated by the University. Tolerating plagiarism undermines the value of your degree and condones cheating. Please remember that plagiarism also includes submitting an assignment that has previously been submitted by you in another course and/or facilitating academic dishonesty by making your completed assignments available for another student to copy.

For more information on plagiarism, review the Understanding Plagiarism (Links to an external site.) page on the Learning Strategies library website.

Turnitin

To help you to make sure that you have cited all of your sources, you will use Turnitin to check your paper. This service provides you with a report indicating any word-for-word matches between your paper and any material that it has in its database.

If your Turnitin report indicates a high plagiarism match, do not panic! You will have an opportunity to make sure that the source matched by Turnitin has been appropriately cited according to APA citation guidelines. When you revise a section of your paper that has been flagged for possible plagiarism, you have two options:

  • Paraphrase material from your sources more carefully.
  • Create in-text citations that clearly attribute ideas to the original authors.

Action Items

  1. Review the Franklin University policy on academic integrity (Links to an external site.)
  2. Download this sample APA paper template download to use for writing your paper, and review the APA Style Library Guide (Links to an external site.) for assistance with formatting if needed.
  3. Write a 1-page paper responding to the following questions in your own words:
    1. What does plagiarism mean to you?
    2. What are the penalties for academic dishonesty at Franklin University?
    3. What are your own personal reasons for avoiding academic dishonesty?
    4. What tools are available for you at Franklin University to avoid plagiarism?