Observing the Student Code of Academic Integrity is crucial to researching if one wants to earn the respect of their peers. Examples of violations provided by the Cornell University (“Code of Academic Integrity”) include representing others’ work as one’s own, fabricating data that supports one’s findings or misrepresenting one’s academic accomplishments. Not following the Code can result in a variety of penalties, ranging from having to redo the work to being expelled from the university.
Integrity is critical in academic and professional life because failures to observe it will eventually be discovered and punished. This is especially true in the modern world where every published work is widely and readily available. There are even automated tools that check your paper against an enormous range of documents, articles, and web pages to look for similarities. However, these tools may also be used to assist the author in observing academic integrity by helping them locate passages that seem similar to other works. The writer can then change those parts if the information is merely common knowledge presented in a similar fashion or properly cite the earlier paper if the data is derived from that study.
There is a variety of resources available to a student that help observe academic integrity rules and verify it, most of them online. Many websites are dedicated to scanning your text and looking for similarities to sources available online. There are also numerous pages that explain the standard strategies for avoiding plagiarism and the idea of citations. The most useful of such resources and perhaps the most useful of all academic integrity resources is the Purdue OWL (“Purdue Online Writing Lab”). In addition to providing suggestions for general writing, it has a dedicated section for research and citation that explains most of the commonly used citation styles, the complexities of which can often lead to mistakes, in detail.
Works Cited
“Code of Academic Integrity.” Cornell University, 1997. Web.
“Purdue Online Writing Lab”. Purdue University College of Liberal Arts, 2018. Web.