Chapter 5. Academic Integrity and a Simple Citation Habit

Chapter 5. Academic Integrity and a Simple Citation Habit

Academic integrity means the work you submit is work you understand, and every idea that is not yours is marked so a reader can find it. This free exam is open-book. Open-book is not permission to paste an answer you cannot explain, to share the exam with someone who has not taken it, or to have another person submit it as you.

Two kinds of plagiarism

Intentional plagiarism is handing in someone else’s paper, buying an answer, or copying a paragraph and pretending you wrote it. Accidental plagiarism is more common online: you paste a sentence into your notes, later you forget it was a paste, and you submit it without quotation marks or a citation. The grade consequence can be the same. Prevent the accident by marking every pasted line in your notes with the source at the moment you paste it.

Paraphrase

A paraphrase is your own sentence structure and your own word choice, plus a citation, because the idea still came from the source. Swapping three synonyms in a copied sentence is still a copy. Read the source, close it, write what you remember, then open it again to check that you did not drift into the author’s sentences and that you did not change the meaning.

Tools that write for you

A spelling tool that fixes a word you chose is ordinary editing. A tool that produces the whole answer, which you then submit as your understanding, breaks the point of the exam. If a course later allows a drafting tool, the instructor will say so and will still expect you to check every claim and cite sources the tool did not invent. Never paste a source, a classmate’s draft, or an exam question into a public tool if the course has not allowed that sharing. In this free course, write the exam answers yourself.

A citation you can actually do

In the text, name the author and the year: (Nguyen, 2024). If there is no person, use the organization: (California Century University, 2026). On a reference list, give enough for a reader to find the work: author or organization, year, title, and where it lives. Italicize the title of a standalone work. Put quotation marks around the title of a short page or article if you are following that pattern. Order the list by the first author’s last name. You do not need a purchased manual to be honest. You need the author, the year, the title, and the location, written the same way every time.

Direct words

If the wording itself matters, quote it and keep the quote short. Example: The course states that the certificate “does not award semester credit.” Then cite it. Long quotes that replace your own explanation do not show that you learned the chapter.

Self-check

1. You pasted a sentence into your notes and forgot. What kind of plagiarism is that if you submit it? Answer: Accidental plagiarism. It still needs a citation and your own wording, or quotation marks if you keep the original words.
2. Does open-book mean you may submit a generated answer you did not write? Answer: No. You must write the answers yourself.
3. What goes in a basic in-text citation? Answer: The author or organization and the year.