Harvard Extension School 51 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 USA (617) 495-4024
© 2012–13 President and Fellows of Harvard College
Learn to avoid the pitfalls of plagiarism. These tips and guidelines can help you produce work with academic integrity.
Harvard Extension School advocates the active exchange of ideas, including course content and independent research, among faculty and students. When submitting assignments for credit all work submitted must be your own and created specifically for each course. The only exceptions are instructor-assigned group projects and preapproved dual submissions. In either of these cases, you must follow explicit procedures (see the policies on inappropriate collaboration and duplicate assignments).
When crafting written assignments you are required to follow standard academic guidelines for proper citation (e.g., APA, MLA, or Chicago Manual of Style). You must distinguish your own ideas and language from information derived from sources. Do not, intentionally or unintentionally, incorporate facts, ideas, or specific language taken from another source without citation.
You are responsible for understanding Harvard Extension School policies on academic integrity and how to use sources responsibly. Not knowing the rules, misunderstanding the rules, running out of time, submitting “the wrong draft,” or being overwhelmed with multiple demands are not acceptable excuses. There are no excuses for failure to uphold academic integrity.
Instructors review student work for incidents of plagiarism (e.g., uncited or incorrectly cited source material) and cheating (e.g., unauthorized collaboration). If suspected, the assignment in question is sent directly to the dean of students. The dean of students works with both the instructor and the student to ensure fair and judicious due process of each case before the Administrative Board.
The consequences for academic dishonesty (cheating and plagiarism) are severe, but appropriate given that it constitutes stealing others’ ideas and attempting to earn college credit for their work. Sanctions may include an RQ grade for the course—a permanent failing grade on your transcript—and suspension for 1 academic year. Intention is not considered when adjudicating cases. The penalty can be the same if you intentionally or unintentionally plagiarize, if it is your first offense, or if it was a final paper, small assignment, or draft.
Harvard University, in general, and Harvard Extension School, in particular, offer resources to support your understanding of academic integrity and responsible use of sources.
The Harvard Guide to Using Sources offers essential information about the use of sources in academic writing. To receive the most benefit, read all 6 sections of the guide from beginning to end. You will gain a deep appreciation for why and how we use sources in academic writing and the ethical implication of improper citation. The guide is your must-consult resource throughout your entire Harvard Extension School career. It offers time-saving, step-by-step advice on how to properly integrate sources into your academic writing.
The six sections are as follows:
The Career and Academic Resource Center (CARC) offers a writing workshop titled Using Sources and Avoiding Plagiarism in Academic Writing. The workshop covers the main tenets of how to correctly and elegantly incorporate sources into academic writing.
Each semester Harvard Extension School offers EXPO E-15 Fundamentals of Academic Writing and EXPO E-25 Academic Writing and Critical Reading. These courses cover the demands and conventions of academic reading and writing. You learn how to analyze texts, build effective arguments, and use evidence and secondary source material.
To support your commitment to academic integrity, CARC and the Writing Program have developed two 15-minute online tutorials as companions to The Harvard Guide to Using Sources.
The tutorials are anonymous open-learning tools, not evaluation tools. While they take the form of yes-or-no and true-or-false exams, they are resources for you to use without the concern about passing or failing. You may need to complete the tutorials several times before you can answer all the questions confidently and correctly. Feel free to retake them as many times as you wish.
In the first tutorial, Using Sources, Five Scenarios, you work through examples based, in part, on real academic honesty cases. Upon completing the tutorial, you will be acquainted with the most common misunderstandings about academic integrity, and you will know more about how to integrate sources responsibly into your writing.
You’ll then be ready for the second tutorial, Using Sources, Five Examples. The examples, which are based on passages from real student essays, illustrate problems with summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting sources. By taking the tutorial, you gain a deeper understanding of the most common forms of plagiarism and a solid sense of how to use sources effectively.
Links to The Harvard Guide to Using Sources are provided throughout each tutorial. The guide offers a comprehensive discussion of issues relevant to academic integrity. Clicking on the links gives you an opportunity to further develop your knowledge of how to use sources—and it helps you avoid the kinds of problems that can lead to a charge of plagiarism and a required withdrawal from the Harvard Extension School.
© 2012–13 President and Fellows of Harvard College