Academic Integrity in a Digital Age

3.1       Violations of Academic Integrity

Among students and other academic community members, there are those who do believe it is morally wrong to cheat. Possibly you may have encountered several types of violations of academic integrity. However, in this section we present the following:

3.1.1 Plagiarism

Plagiarism occurs because of mainly having: no referencing; incorrect referencing; poor note-taking skills; and poor paraphrasing.  In this section you are introduced in how one can detect plagiarism. One of the strategies is to look for inconsistencies in writing styles within and between papers; signs of datedness; mixed citation styles; and a lack of references or quotations. The one who has prepared the text will be consistent and there will be a good flow of ideas.

This is an act or instance of using or closely imitating the language and thoughts of another author without authorisation and the representation of that author’s work as one’s own, as by not crediting the original author (Ereta, E & Gokmenoglua, 2010; Theart & Smit, 2012; Wong, Lim & Quinlan, 2016). It is said that, this is type of violation in academic integrity where one uses another person’s words, language, ideas or results without giving that person appropriate credit. To avoid plagiarism, every direct quotation must be identified by quotation marks, or appropriate indentation, and both direct quotation, and the paraphrased text must be cited properly, according to the accepted format for the particular discipline or as required by the instructor in a course. According to Kohl (2011), Strittmatter and Bratton (2014), Edussuriya, Marambe, Wanniarachchi, and Ramanayake (2014) and Ahmed and  Ullah (2015) some examples of plagiarism include:

• Copying word for word (i.e. quoting directly) from an oral, printed, or electronic source without proper attribution.
• Submitting as your own any academic exercise prepared totally or in part by another or one submitting a work containing significant portions of text from a single source without alterations and acknowledging
• Combining perfectly cited sources with copies materials without citation
• Mixing copied materials from different sources and or includes citations to non-existent or inaccurate information about sources
• Copying information from computer-based sources, i.e., The Internet
• Allowing another person to substantially alter or revise your work and submitting it entirely as your own
• One submitting a work changed in keywords, but same content
• Paraphrasing without proper attribution, i.e., Presenting in one’s own words another person’s written words or ideas as if they were one’s own.
• Submitting a purchased or downloaded term paper or other materials to satisfy a course requirement.
• Incorporating into one’s work graphs, drawings, photographs, diagrams, tables, spreadsheets, computer programs, or other non textual material from other sources without proper attribution.