Academic Responsibility

If you pass off the work of others as your own, you commit either plagiarism or collusion. Both are serious academic offenses prohibited by the University and the First-Year English Program.

We recognize that if you’re new to college or haven’t written a lot of papers, you may be unsure about what constitutes responsible academic work.

The following definitions will help you better understand what these expectations are.

• Plagiarism
• Collusion
• Recycling Papers
• Consequences

To help you better understand about plagiarism and collusion, take the Plagiarism and Collusion Quiz.

If you have any questions about this information, please talk with your instructor or contact the First-Year English Program.

Plagiarism

The Academic Responsibility Code in the Carolina Community: USC Columbia Student Handbook and Policy Guide prohibits you from “unauthorized use of another person’s work without proper acknowledgement of source.” Unauthorized use that involves passing off someone else’s written work as your own is called plagiarism. Plagiarism can entail several kinds of misrepresentation. For example, you commit plagiarism if you:

• Take, buy, or accept a paper written by someone else and present any of it as your own work. This includes papers from the Web.
• Include passages taken word-for-word from someone else’s text in your own paper without placing that material in quotation marks and citing the source.
• Fail to acknowledge the source of any information in your paper that is not either common knowledge or personal knowledge. Common knowledge includes facts, dates, events, information, and concepts that most of the general public knows. Even if you used an encyclopedia to look up the dates of the Civil War, for instance, you wouldn’t need to cite that source in your bibliography because those dates fall into the range of common knowledge. If you want to discuss events at a particular Civil War military prison, though, you would need to cite your source, since few people are familiar with that information.
• Borrow ideas, examples, or the structure of another text without acknowledging it – even if the language of the paper is your own. For example, if you make an argument about the death penalty using the exact same points in the same order as an editorial in last week’s newspaper, without citing that editorial as the source of your arguments, you are guilty of plagiarism.

Avoiding Plagiarism

All college students should know better than to buy an essay, download papers off the Web, or copy someone else’s work verbatim. But if you haven’t done a lot of college writing assignments, you may not understand the more subtle forms of plagiarism discussed above. Part of the reason you’re taking English 101 and 102 is to learn how to find and use source materials appropriately in your writing. You’ll find plenty of resources to help you, if you seek them out:

• Your instructor will be able to advise you on the best way to acknowledge source materials or collaborative help you’ve received on a particular assignment. When you have questions about how to honestly and accurately present material in a paper, go to your instructor before the assignment is due.
• One of the textbooks you’ll use in First-Year English will be a writer’s handbook like The Scott Foresman Handbook that contains comprehensive information about using, quoting, citing, and documenting sources in academic papers. You should consult this book when you have questions about particular conventions, rules, and strategies.
• The university libraries can provide you with handbooks, worksheets, and access to online information about systems of documentation used in academic writing (you’ll be using the MLA system in your First-Year English classes).
• The consultants at the Writing Center can also offer advice and materials on using source materials appropriately.

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Collusion

The Academic Responsibility Code in the Carolina Community: USC Columbia Student Handbook and Policy Guide prohibits “[g]iving or receiving unauthorized assistance, or attempting to give or receive such assistance, in connection with the performance of any academic work.” If someone writes (or dictates) all or part of an assignment for you, or if you give or accept inappropriate help on a writing assignment, you are guilty of collusion. Like plagiarism, collusion is a serious academic offense that violates university and First-Year English policies.

Avoiding collusion

Are you committing collusion if a tutor or classmate helps you with a paper? It depends. It’s always appropriate to approach a classmate, friends, or a tutor when you want general feedback about a piece that you’re writing. Your English 101 class will probably even ask you to participate in peer revision workshops so that you can get classmates’ advice on your work in progress. But help that goes beyond constructive advice to doing some or all of the writing, revising, editing, or proofreading for you is collusion – it’s passing off work that’s partly someone else’s as your own. When you get help with your writing, it’s your responsibility to set appropriate limits. If you need extra help on an assignment, we suggest that you visit the Writing Center, where tutors are highly qualified and have received special training in providing writers with appropriate kinds of help. If you decide to seek tutoring from another source, review the following guidelines with your tutor and go to your instructor immediately if you have questions: A tutor (or other helper) may legitimately:

• Discuss your topic, audience, purpose, evidence, and other broad rhetorical concerns about a paper.
• Point out general patterns of error in a draft.
• Suggest general approaches for solving rhetorical, stylistic, or mechanical problems.
• Review specific grammatical or mechanical conventions (but not fix particular errors in your draft).

A tutor (or other helper) may not:

• Write or dictate a draft or a section of a draft – even a sentence or two – for you.
• Edit or proofread a paper and then correct the errors.
• Do research for you or procure other substantive material for a paper.

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Recycling Papers

During the busiest times of the semester, it’s tempting to look for shortcuts. When you have two midterm exams and an English paper due during the same week, you might wonder, “Would it really be so bad to turn in that research paper I wrote in high school in English 101?” Don’t do it.

Recycling old work violates First-Year English Program policy. It is academically dishonest because it misleads your instructor into treating work completed in another setting as a fresh response to an English 101 or 102 assignment. Besides being dishonest, turning in an old paper can actually hurt your performance in class. When you don’t do an assignment, you lose a valuable chance to practice and improve your writing skills. And experienced instructors say that papers written for other classes rarely match the exact requirements of an English 101 or 102 assignment, so such papers are unlikely to receive good grades.

Occasionally, an instructor may allow you to write a new paper using research you’ve done for another course or substantially revise a paper that’s already written. If you’re interested in doing this, be sure to approach your instructor before the assignment is due and be prepared to show him or her a copy of the original paper.

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Consequences

USC and the First-Year English Program take academic dishonesty seriously. In the academic world, passing off work that is not your own response to an assignment is like robbery or grand larceny: the penalties are serious. They can include all or some combination of the following:

• An F on the assignment in question.
• An F for the course.
• A written reprimand or letter of warning from the Dean’s Office that becomes part of your permanent academic record.
• Suspension or expulsion from USC.

If your instructor suspects or determines that you have plagiarized a paper or engaged in any of the other kinds of academic dishonesty discussed in this section, he or she will take the paper to the First-Year English Director. The Director, in consultation with the instructor, will decide whether academic dishonesty has occurred and what the consequences will be. You will also be interviewed during this process. Then the case will be turned over to the Dean’s Office. Plagiarism – even a first offense – usually results in failure of the course and sometimes in expulsion. For detailed information about USC’s regulations and procedures for dealing with academic dishonesty, see the section on “Academic Responsibility” in the Carolina Community: USC Columbia Student Handbook and Policy Guide .

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