Week 6 - Are you going to cite that?

This week we learned about Academic Integrity and Plagiarism. Since the beginning of our education, well since middle school when we started writing papers, we have learned about plagiarism and how it is wrong to copy someone else’s work without giving them the credit they deserve. As the internet became more accessible and information has become available at the click of a button, there are more chances for students to copy someone else’s work.   It is important as a student to practice good academic integrity. It is important to do your own work, take credit for only what are your ideas and do not cheat on exams or test. Having strong academic integrity while in school is important to your professional life because it will teach you how to be professional in the work place and take credit for ideas that are yours and not the ideas of others.

The ideas presented this week will help me in my future while doing research and writing papers because it has shown me all aspects of the idea of plagiarism and will help to be aware of ways of citing research in order to keep my academic integrity and stay away from plagiarism. This class has taught me a lot about citing ideas found in sources used for researching my topic.

Once I am working in my chosen career as an educator, it will prove important to know the rules of plagiarism because I will need to keep my students from making the same mistakes made by many students. It is important to teach them academic integrity and the importance of submitting their own ideas and research. It will also be helpful for me to know ways of finding what has been plagiarized as well. I am going to need to be able to hold my students accountable.

There are things about plagiarism and academic integrity I learned this week that I may have never thought of before this week’s readings and tutorial.  For example, I wasn’t aware that using a report done for a class previously was not able to be used again unless agreed upon by both instructors beforehand. I had always just assumed that if the subject was the same, as long as you changed the paper around a bit to meet the requirements of the new class, it would be okay. I am glad to learn now that it is not okay so I won’t make that mistake in the future.  

This class has been very useful and I have been learning a lot of new research methods as well as ways to use the different databases available to us. I have also learned ways to cite work, create annotations, and find good research information. All information I will take with me to my next classes and into my life as an educator.