Helping You Avoid Plagiarism and Conquering Your Fears of Academic Research

As the dean of the online learning campus, I also teach one course per term, and as that term opens, I always start off by telling students that I want to talk about the biggest challenge that they will face in the course-the writing assignments. I realize that this might scare many people, especially in a college course.  I know that the first college essay I wrote back in 1992 frightened me.  I made an A in that English course, and it was simply because I had a great instructor. I remember him well.  His name was Professor Howard Williams, and he was such an effective instructor.  He made sure that we had all the directions and information that we needed to complete the essays in a satisfactory manner. He even met with us a few times before we submitted the essays to him for final grading, and he even graded the final product in front of us!  How brave and intimidating at the same time.  

While professors cannot meet with their online students personally, what they can do is offer information and electronic sources to them as you start the process of writing their first paper.  The first thing that I always address in terms of writing papers is the issue of plagiarism.  I ask students to make themselves familiar with the Honor Code at GMC. We do not tolerate academic dishonesty, and when it appears in the online courses, we submit an honors council referral. As the dean of the campus, I can attest that I see way more of those than I want to see.  I feel, however, that some students do not intend to plagiarize, but they back in to it unintentionally.  The consequences are still the same, as we cannot discern intent, but we can try to combat lack of knowledge and understanding of the rules and process. That is what I attempt to do in my opening comments to the class, and I wanted to replicate that here for the purposes of a wider audience.

Here is the advice I give to my students:
First, familiarize yourself with what plagiarism is and how to avoid it.  There is a great resource in the way of Harvard University's website where they devote an entire webpage to the topic.  Here is the link:
http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k70847&pageid=icb.page342057

I would also like to introduce you to a great resource for checking your papers to see if they are potentially going to be flagged for plagiarism.  It is free!  The site is called Paper Rater.  Here is the link:
http://www.paperrater.com

Another set of resources I want to introduce you to are YouTube videos that discuss plagiarism, college research and paraphrasing.  These resources are valuable tools in helping you understand how to avoid getting caught plagiarizing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyYgQj1tERw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPvQQQCUT8

Also, our GMC library has a great resource page for research, writing, and avoiding plagiarism.  Here are the links for that:
http://gmcga.libguides.com/citationmanagement
http://gmcga.libguides.com/copyright
http://gmcga.libguides.com/plagiarism
http://gmcga.libguides.com/doingresearch

My students tend to respond very well to these resources. Sadly, however, some do not use them, and the product reflects that.  Take these resources and save them in your favorites bar.  Refer back to them in your classes.  Learning these concepts now will help you in the future to conquer your fears of writing papers and will also help you avoid plagiarism. 

Dean Jeffery C. Wells
Academic Dean-GMC Online Learning Campus