Academic Honesty

Defining Academic Honesty

It is important to maintain academic honesty when submitting written work in courses
offered by Everest Online. Academic honesty includes avoiding plagiarism, avoiding
falsification, and refraining from submitting work to more than one course. Forms of
academic dishonesty are defined and explained below. These practices are unacceptable, and
may result in a variety of punitive measures that may range from receiving a zero on the
project, failing the course, or even being suspended from school:
1. Plagiarism: In simple terms, plagiarism is using someone else's work without giving them
credit.
a. When a quotation is taken directly from what someone said or wrote, the quotation must
have quotation marks around the words that are quoted and a citation that clearly explains
who is being quoted and where the quotation was found. Giving proper credit is academic
honesty and avoids plagiarism.
b. It is important to carefully research ideas and words in academic writing to ensure that
there is no chance of accidentally using someone else's work. Accuracy in citations and
references is the best means to avoid problems that lead to plagiarism charges.
c. Examples of how to quote from a source, how to paraphrase, how to include a citation
and a reference, and samples of typical errors, are provided below.
2. Falsification: Falsification is the act of deliberately changing information, such as results
or statistics, to make it suit your needs. Deliberately changing a source's intent by misquoting
or taking information out of context to make a point is a form of intellectual dishonesty and
must be avoided.
3. Multiple submissions: If you want to turn in the same work or use the same research for
more than one course, you must obtain permission from all professors involved. Failure to
obtain this permission constitutes academic dishonesty. Each course is a chance for you to
develop new knowledge and explore your own creativity. The best policy is to submit
original work for all assignments.
For an extensive discussion of plagiarism click on this link to the Turnitin web site:
http://www.plagiarism.org/learning_center/what_is_plagiarism.html

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Recognizing Unacceptable and Acceptable Paraphrases

The following paragraph is quoted from a book titled, A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of
Disorder (Abrahamson & Freedman, 2006, p. 180).
Elbert "Burt" Rutan's career trajectory hasn't followed that of a typical manager. Now a
successful CEO, Rutan's job in the late 1960s found him in an F-4 Phantom jet fighter that
was tumbling to the ground. Never before had an out-of-control F-4 avoided crashing, but this
time, thanks in part to Rutan's skill, the plane recovered. Rutan wasn't a fighter jock; he was
an engineer who had been asked to figure out why the treacherous aircraft was flying pilots
into the ground in Vietnam. While his fellow engineers attacked such tasks with calculators,
Rutan insisted on considering the problem in the air. The near fatal experience not only led to
a critical F-4 modification, it also confirmed for Rutan a notion he had held ever since he had
built model airplanes as a child. The way to make a better aircraft wasn't to sit around
perfecting a design, it was to get something up in the air and see what happens, then try to fix
whatever goes wrong.
This is the correct format for a quotation:
Original text:
Now a successful CEO, Rutan's job in the late 1960s found him in an F-4 Phantom jet fighter
that was tumbling to the ground.
Quoted text:
"Rutan's job in the late 1960s found him in an F-4 Phantom jet fighter that was t umbling to
the ground" (Abrahamson & Freedman, 2006, p. 180).
This is an example of a correct paraphrase:
Original text:
See Abrahamson and Freedman (2006) quoted paragraph above.
Paraphrased text:
In a story reported by Abrahamson and Freedman's (2006), there was a man named Rutan
who once worked as a test pilot for F-4 Phantom jets. According to the authors, Rutan had an
interesting perspective on how to get things done; instead of spending so much time trying to
make something perfect, sometimes it is just better to jump into the problem and see what
happens. For Rutan, that meant flying jet planes to see why they were crashing and in a sense
flying by the seat of his pants because he had to respond on the spot, he didn't know what to
expect. Fortunately, for Rutan, his instincts were right and he found the cause for the crashes
instead of being a victim of a crash.

Why is this passage acceptable?

This is acceptable paraphrasing because the writer:
Accurately states the information according to the author's intent
Lets the reader know the source of the information
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This is an example of an incorrect paraphrase:

Original text:
(For complete paragraph, see Abrahamson and Freedman (2006) quoted above.)
The near fatal experience not only led to a critical F-4 modification, it also confirmed for
Rutan a notion he had held ever since he had built model airplanes as a child. The way to
make a better aircraft wasn't to sit around perfecting a design, it was to get something up in
the air and see what happens, then try to fix whatever goes wrong.
Plagiarized text:
The nearly fatal experience led to a vital F-4 change and it validated for Rutan that the notion
he had ever since building model airplanes when he was a child. He thought that the way to
make aircraft better wasn't to sit around making a perfect design, it was to see what happens
when you get something up in the air and maybe then fix what goes wrong.

What makes this passage plagiarized and not paraphrased?

The preceding passage is considered plagiarism for two reasons:
The writer changed some words (e.g., critical was replaced with vital, confirmed was
replaced with validated).
Some phrases were changed (e.g., The near fatal experience not only led to was
modified to The nearly fatal experience led to; then try to fix whatever goes wrong was
modified to then fix what goes wrong)
Only a few words or phrases were changed and the order some of the original sentences
were changed.
The writer has failed to cite a source for any of the ideas or facts.
If you do any of these things, you are plagiarizing someones work .
This is an example of using both paraphrasing and quotes:
Original text:
(See Abrahamson and Freedman (2006) quoted paragraph from above )
Elbert "Burt" Rutan's career trajectory hasn't followed that of a typical manager. Now a
successful CEO, Rutan's job in the late 1960s found him in an F-4 Phantom jet fighter that
was tumbling to the ground. Never before had an out-of-control F-4 avoided crashing, but this
time, thanks in part to Rutan's skill, the plane recovered. Rutan wasn't a fighter jock; he was
an engineer who had been asked to figure out why the treacherous aircraft was flying pilots
into the ground in Vietnam. While his fellow engineers attacked such tasks with calculators,
Rutan insisted on considering the problem in the air. The near fatal experience not only led to
a critical F-4 modification, it also confirmed for Rutan a notion he had held ever since he had
built model airplanes as a child. The way to make a better aircraft wasn't to sit around
perfecting a design, it was to get something up in the air and see what happens, then try to fix
whatever goes wrong.

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Paraphrase with quote:

Abrahamson and Freedman (2006) wrote about an interesting man named Burt Rutan, who
had an exciting life as an aircraft engineer in the 1960s. Rutan worked on an avionic problem
associate with the F-4 Phantom jet, a problem he was able to resolve by using a philosophy
he had from his childhood, a time when he made model airplanes. "The way to make a better
aircraft wasn't to sit around perfecting a design, it was to get something up in the air and see
what happens, then try to fix whatever goes wrong" (p. 180).

Why is this passage acceptable?

This is acceptable paraphrasing because the writer:
Recorded the information in the original passage accurately
Gave credit for the ideas in this passage
Indicated which part is taken directly from the source by putting the passage in
quotation marks and citing the page number
If the sentence did not have quotation marks around the part taken directly from the original
work, the sentence would be plagiarized. It is considered plagiarism to use any published
material without proper citation including words, pictures, graphs, and charts. In the case of
words that are directly quoted, quotation marks are required along with the citation and the
page number where the quote was found.
Reference:
Abrahamson, E. & Freedman, D. (2006). A perfect mess: The hidden benefits of
disorder. NY, NY: Little, Brown, and Co.

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