Guidelines for Best Practices:Academic Honesty

Source: Baruch College, CUNY

[ N. B., These brackets, as used here and elsewhere, usually indicate an entry has been edited for amplification, brevity, clarification, or editorial comment The advice below is useful for anyone, no matter what role or position in life achieved, and reminds you that you should always regard yourself as a student continuously learning how to manage the changes in your life.]

Learning involves the pursuit of truth, which cannot be pursued by presenting someone else’s work as your own. By following procedure outlined below, you will establish a basis of trust that will remain unless you provide reason to suspect it has been violated. [Furthermore, recognize that except for personal testimonials or a strong basis for credibility, most information you present will only be regarded as credible IF you can support your claims with credible support. You should be skeptical of any claims made that seem counter-intuitive and assume that claims asserted without evidence are some form of agitprop . . . there is a lot of that going around these days.]

1.      Visit the Baruch College’s homepage and look under Students à Resources and Information à Academic Honesty.

2.      Go to this web page: http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/academic/academic_honesty.html

3.      Read the material it contains.

4.      Send me an email (or bring a signed statement to class) truthfully stating that you have read the web page, understood it, and that you agree to act according to the principles it expresses.

For further discussion of plagiarism and clarification of its parameters, see the online plagiarism tutorial prepared by members of the Newman Library faculty at http://newman.baruch.cuny.edu/help/plagiarism/default.htm. If questions remain, ask. Ignorance is not an acceptable excuse for unacceptable practices. For the record, if you violate the precepts of academic integrity you will receive a zero for the assignment and your name will be forwarded to the Office of the Dean of Students, where a notation will become part of your file at Baruch.

Baruch’s Writing Center. [

 The Writing Center offers students support in evaluating and using sources, citation, and plagiarism avoidance. In one-to-one consultations, students share their drafts and research materials with an instructor of college writing to ensure effective source presentation and citation. In addition to individual sessions, the Center offers a small-group workshop in Ethical Writing and Research. More information is available at http://baruch.cuny.edu/writingcenter.

Writing Handbook : The college's writing handbook also should be useful in addressing issues of plagiarism -- all undergraduates who entered as freshmen should own one of the three handbooks we have used since 2002:

. Fowler and Aaron, The Essential Little, Brown Handbook, pp. 150-56

. Fowler and Aaron, The Little, Brown Handbook, pp. 629-38

. Raimes, Keys for Writers, 3rd edition, pp. 104-112; 4th edition, pp. 116-128

Please report violations of academic integrity

Students are entitled to due process but cases very rarely move as far as a hearing. The process usually unfolds quickly once you have reported the incident to Ron Aaron (646-312-4577). Two important functions of reporting are: 1) to educate the student; and 2) to track whether incidents involving the student have been reported before. The reporting form is now available as an online report at https://baruch.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_6r3tVBe3RmBMAYt

A Definition of Plagiarism :  Plagiarism means presenting the work of others as your own. The "work of others" means other people's words and/or ideas. "Presenting...as your own" means including that work in your assignment without adequate citation. Therefore, a slightly longer definition would be "Plagiarism means including in your assignment other people's words and/or ideas without citing them correctly." Here are some hints about citation: When you include the actual words of others, be they from a printed source, from the web, or from a live presentation, they must appear within quotation marks and you must indicate from where and from whom the words came. Otherwise you are plagiarizing. When you include another person's ideas, you must indicate where you found those ideas, even when you are paraphrasing them. Following someone else's sequence of ideas, even if you paraphrase them, also is plagiarism. (An example would be paraphrasing a paragraph from someone else's work, sentence by sentence, even if you include a citation of that author.) If you have any questions about these definitions, please discuss them with me.

You can also refer to Baruch's online plagiarism tutorial http://newman.baruch.cuny.edu/help/plagiarism/default.htm or to Ann Raimes, Keys for Writers (4^th ed., pp. 116-128; 3^rd ed., pp. 1

04-112), or Fowler and Aaron, The Little, Brown Handbook (pp. 629-38) or The Essential Little, Brown Handbook (pp. 150-56), where you can also read about correct styles of citation.