The Ethics of Paper Writing

Plagiarism is a serious offense. Read the section on Academic Honesty published each year in The Course of Study handbook issued each year by the Registrar's Office. You can be found guilty of plagiarism even if you did not intend to deceive, and the penalties for plagiarism can include an F in the course or suspension from the College.

Further: in the electronic age, the possibilities for purchasing papers are increasingly numerous. Because of this lamentable fact, faculty may ask to see or even require the evidence of your research process. You should retain your notes, index cards, print-outs of sources, and so forth for one year after you have turned in a paper, just in case you should ever be asked to document your research process.

Learning to write a research paper means learning how to keep track of sources and also how to present information so that the reader knows which are your ideas and which are part of the background that inspired you. All quotations should be carefully punctuated as such, and you may not paraphrase or borrow someone else's ideas without citing a reference. Citations do not have to appear in every sentence, but may appear, for example, at the end of a paragraph in which you have summarized someone's argument or data. Cite only those sources you were able to consult, and if you learn of someone's idea second hand, that is, you were not able to consult the original source (this happens frequently when using a small library such as Kenyon's) then your citations must indicate that circumstance (Urban 1973, cited in Suggs 1985). Your References Cited must then contain an appropriate entry.

For example:

Urban, Patricia

1973 The Term Paper. New York: Random House. Cited in David Suggs, ed. 1985. Things Every Teacher Should Know. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Read the section in the Student Handbook under Academic Honesty for a discussion of other potentially troublesome instances, and notice there a description of procedures and penalties for infractions.

Defacing or misusing library materials harms and annoys other people who want to use those materials. Every semester students report that certain journals or books they need are missing, and occasionally that pages have been ripped out. Please return journals to their shelves; do not squirrel them away where only you can find them. Faculty will suspect and question students about misuse of the library if their papers contain references to materials which the librarian or other students have said are missing from the library. If the student is guilty, faculty may exact a grade penalty on the assignment.