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Date: | Fri, 3 Apr 2009 20:44:30 -0400 |
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I second Anne Mayhew's concern that plagiarism as property-rights
violation has been over-emphasized. I frankly think it aggravates the
student-as-consumer metaphor that haunts education now. We're working
on a different approach to academic integrity here with our freshman
seminar by framing the positive practices that students should be
learning. Here's the overview:
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ACADEMIC PRACTICES
Academic work is devoted to pursuing, cultivating, preserving, and
transmitting knowledge; it is similar to a very extensive and
systematic conversation. Academic integrity consists of the virtues
that support and nourish the conversation: accuracy, honesty,
transparency, openness to questioning, willingness to communicate,
and similar virtues. Violations of academic integrity thwart the
purposes of academic work. All professions rely on these virtues and
expect them of their members.
Plagiarism consists of representing someone else's words or ideas as
your own, whether deliberately or inadvertently. It can take a
variety of forms, and they all violate the norms of academic
integrity, as do other actions like turning in the same paper for two
different classes or cheating on exams. Avoiding plagiarism and
maintaining academic integrity is accomplished by a set of good
practices that begin with reading and go all the way through accurate
referencing in bibliographies.
* The good practice of reading means taking notes
* The good practice of attribution means always making clear
whose voice or idea is being presented.
* The good practice of paraphrasing means to transform an idea
into new phrasing, and nearly always means to digest and condense it
for the purpose of connecting it with other ideas.
* The good practice of quotation means both accuracy of form
(including quotation marks) and aptness of selection.
* The good practice of citation means clearly locating cited
materials in their original sources.
* The good practice of bibliographic entries means clearly
identifying the information needed for others to find the original sources.
Paul Turpin
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