Education | | Academic Integrity and Honor Pledge | Prevention | Detection | Action | Resources | Links
In pursuit of its teaching, learning and research goals, the University of Cincinnati holds its students, faculty and administrators to the highest ethical standards defined by The Center for Academic Integrity as “a commitment, even in the face of adversity, to five fundamental values: honesty, trust, fairness, respect, and responsibility”. Although not all students are subject to a college honor code or pledge, every student is bound by the academic misconduct provisions of this code enforced to assure academic integrity. When dishonest students cheat to gain unfair competitive advantage over other students, they cheat themselves out of a decent education.
Some faculty members and academic units may require students before taking tests and/or when submitting assignments to sign a pledge. The pledge may contain language such as: “On my honor I pledge that this work of mine does not violate the U.C. Student Code of Conduct provisions on cheating and plagiarism.” Honor pledges serve primarily as a teaching tool; unless a college has a mandatory honor code, pledges are used at the discretion of the instructor.
NEW! Academic Integrity & Honor Pledge Campaign FAQ (Word document)
SafeAssign™ is a plagiarism prevention service, offered by Blackboard. Instructors can set up SafeAssignments in their Blackboard courses and let students submit papers to these assignments. As students submit papers, they are checked against SafeAssign's comprehensive databases of source material. The papers will then be delivered to instructors through the Blackboard Learning System together with the originality reports, with the results of the matching process, attached to them. (This information is taken from the SafeAssign Wiki, where you can learn more about SafeAssign, see sample reports, etc).
Please note that when students submit a Blackboard written assignment for an instructor using the new text-matching software they will see the following:
Please note that material submitted for this assignment will be screened by Blackboard's SafeAssign feature against a variety of databases. The purpose of this feature is to minimize plagiarism and to help educate students about the proper citation of any borrowed content. For more information about plagiarism and citation conventions, please see <http://www.libraries.uc.edu/instruction/students/plagiarism.html> As part of the submission process, you will also have the opportunity to leave a copy of your work within the SafeAssign Global Reference Database, which helps to protect the originality of your work across institutions. This step is voluntary and you may choose not to participate in this part of the submission process. For more information please check with your instructor.
See the following sources for plagiarism prevention tips:
Anti-Plagiarism Strategies for Research Papers by Robert Harris
Plagiarism Stoppers: A Teacher’s Guide by Jane Sharka at NCSUD
CyberPlagiarism: Detection and Prevention (Penn State)
Preventing Plagiarism (Preventing and Detecting Plagiarism, University of Texas at Austin)
Additional Web links
Make it clear to the students that you know their writing style.
Work with librarians to develop creative assignments.
Faculty Guidelines for Responding to Academic Misconduct (Word document) are intended to help faculty members respond to cheating and plagiarism. They are based on the 2007 Student Code of Conduct that assures due process for students accused of misconduct while enabling course instructors to impose appropriate sanctions for academic misconduct.
To search for resources on plagiarism and academic integrity in the UC Library catalog and the OhioLINK Library Catalog, use the following subject heading: Plagiarism (click here for search results in the UC library catalog) or Plagiarism - Prevention (click here for search results in the UC library catalog). This subject heading will also retrieve relevant periodical articles in the Academic Search Complete database.
NEW! Featured books
Marsh, Bill. Plagiarism : alchemy and remedy in higher education. Albany : State University of New York Press, c2007. Langsam Stacks PN167 .M285 2007 (link to catalog record)
Posner, Richard A. The little book of plagiarism. New York : Pantheon Books, c2007. Langsam Stacks
K1485 .P67 2007 (link to catalog record).
Robin, Ron Theodore. Scandals and scoundrels : seven cases that shook the academy. Berkeley : University of California Press, c2004. Langsam Stacks, Clermont Stacks PN167 .R63 2004 (link to catalog record)
Stern, Linda. What every student should know about avoiding plagiarism. New York : Pearson/Longman, c2007. Langsam Stacks PN167 .S74 2007 (link to catalog record)
Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The WPA Statement on Best Practices. " The statement is intended to provide helpful suggestions and clarifications so that instructors, administrators, and students can work together more effectively in support of excellence in teaching and learning."
OVCR - Plagiarism
A comprehensive collection of links to online articles about plagiarism, copyright and intellectual freedom, resources on plagiarism for instructors and students, plagiarism case studies, detection tools, and term paper
sites. The links have been carefully selected for the research Ethics pages on the site of the Office of the Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Teaching Ethics for Research, Scholarship, & Practice: Instructional Materials
A wonderful collection of resources on ethical issues, including plagiarism, from the University of Minnesota. Materials are organized by ethical issue, discipline, and format.
Badke, William. "Give Plagiarism the Weight It Deserves." Online; Sep/Oct2007, Vol. 31 Issue 5, p58-60, 3p. (Online, requires off-campus access).
Snow, Eleanour. “Teaching Students about Plagiarism: An Internet Solution to an Internet Problem” (online). An article on " the role that online technology should play not only in the detection of plagiarism but also in the proactive prevention of plagiarism in the form of online tutorials."
Suggest new resources on plagiarism for this page.
The content of this page was originally developed by the Academic Integrity Committee in Spring 2003. The page was updated by the Academic Integrity Committee and University Libraries Instructional Faculty in September 2007.
