Academic Honesty: Home

Academic honesty is important to ensure a fair learning environment for all students and involves trust and respect. Every student and teacher has a responsibility to maintain this learning environment. 

There are some key terms that you need to know to ensure that you are maintaining academic honesty:

Cheating: Act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage.

Fabrication: Invent (something) in order to deceive.

Unauthorised collaboration: The action of working with someone to produce something without permission.

Plagiarism: The practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own.

Oxford University Press, 2018. 

Some general advice:

• When reading a passage, try first to understand it as a whole, rather than pausing to write down specific ideas or phrases.
• Be selective. Unless your assignment is to do a formal or "literal" paraphrase, you usually don't need to paraphrase an entire passage; instead, choose and summarise the material that helps you make a point in your assignment/essay.
• Think of what "your own words" would be if you were telling someone who's unfamiliar with your subject (your mother, your brother, a friend) what the original source said.
• Remember that you can use direct quotations of phrases from the original within your paraphrase, and that you don't need to change or put quotation marks around shared language.

The University of Wisconsin, 2018.