Academic Honesty - Essay Example

Academic Honesty Academic Honesty The term academic honesty refers to the utilization of an individual’s own ideas and content while they write their papers or indulge in any form f activity that is related to their classrooms. This writing will focus on one of the aspects of academic honesty which is plagiarism and will focus on the definition of plagiarism while taking into account the repercussions of it and how one can avoid plagiarism. Anderson states that plagiarism can be defined as “an act of using the words of another without giving the originator credit” (Anderson, 1998, p.1). This means that plagiarism is the act of copying and submitting the work of another author and claiming the work to be the efforts of the person who is submitting the work and not giving any credit to the author who had originally authored that piece of work.

One of the most modern ways of detecting plagiarism is the use of plagiarism-checking applications such as Turnitin. When using this software, the teacher submits the work on the website of Turnitin and the website compares the work from various academic and internet databases for similar content that has been submitted by some other individual. According to Green one of the consequences of plagiarism is that “it is the breach of faith in the social contract between the reader and the writer” (Green, 2008, p.112). Furthermore, students who indulge in plagiarism may have to suffer severe consequences such as being graded as failed in a particular subject or course, and may even be expelled from their educational institute.

One of the ways through which plagiarism can be avoided is that the writer gives credit to the original author of the content through the use of references. Another way is that the writer paraphrases the content while giving credit to the original author. I promise that throughout my educational period as well as my professional life, I will never indulge in the act of plagiarism or any form of academic dishonesty.