Chapter 12: Academic Integrity and Responsible Source Use

What You Will Make

Create an integrity note identifying source use, collaboration, reused material, and assistance relevant to your assignment. Check the course and institution’s current rules before relying on a practice. Disclosure cannot authorize a prohibited method.

Check Meaning as Well as Credit

Keep exact words visibly quoted and attributed. A paraphrase uses your own structure while preserving the source’s meaning and credit. Changing several words or adding a reference does not repair a distorted statement.

Fictional teaching case: This lesson uses the invented campus-transit records in Chapter 1. Record labels and numbers are practice material, not real research to cite or submit.

Repair a Misleading Source Sentence

Draft: “Forty per cent of students cannot get home after class (Record C).” The calculation eight divided by twenty is correct, but “students” silently expands a voluntary sample into a population, and “cannot get home” expands missing a bus into having no way home.

Repair: “Eight of the twenty volunteers reported a class ending after the last bus (Record C, method and item 3).” Follow with your analysis of what this does and does not establish. The improvement concerns meaning and scope, not only citation format.

For a real source, record the actual bibliographic details and required locator. Do not copy a plausible reference from a tool without locating the source and checking the attached claim.

Try It Yourself

Compare one paragraph with every source it uses. Mark copied wording, paraphrased ideas, your analysis, and unsupported additions. Correct both attribution and meaning.

Separately record what another person or tool contributed. If permitted AI assistance suggested search terms, say that; if it drafted or translated text, do not call it merely proofreading. Use the required disclosure format and seek clarification about uncertain permissions. Check before reusing earlier coursework, even when you wrote it.

Check Your Work

• Can each source-dependent statement be traced and verified?
• Are paraphrases accurate and distinct from near-copying?
• Do assistance and reuse records describe the actual work?
• Are you following the governing policy rather than assuming disclosure is enough?

Keep notes and important draft versions so you can explain your process honestly if asked.

Source Guidance

Paraphrased ideas still require attribution; exact borrowed wording needs quotation treatment. (University of Toronto)