Graduate Writing: Academic Integrity

Maintaining academic integrity is vital to your standing as a serious scholar and writer. If you have difficulty understanding proper citation, quoting, and paraphrasing, take advantage of the SafeAssign Drafts area of your classroom and the Writing Center's plagiarism prevention modules.

Your classroom includes an opportunity for you to check for accidental plagiarism before submitting an assignment. This area, known as SafeAssign Drafts, is found on the left side bar in Blackboard. There you can run an in-progress essay through SafeAssign, skim the report, and determine whether you need to paraphrase more effectively or add quotation marks to indicate verbatim wording. 

For example: If SafeAssign highlights a matching sentence from your selected journal article, and you have not enclosed that sentence in quotation marks, you must do so, as well as provide a citation with author, year, and page number. An alternate option is to paraphrase (putting the information in your own words). 

For help running and understanding a SafeAssign report, see the SafeAssign Student Tutorial. You can also contact the Customer Care Team for assistance: support@mail.waldenu.edu. 

Overt plagiarism is one type of plagiarism, often called “copy and paste” plagiarism. Writers exhibit overt plagiarism when they include direct quotes (word-for-word repetitions) of sources without proper attribution of that source: quotation marks and a citation.

This module might be appropriate for you to complete if you

• Are unsure how to include and properly cite quotations of sources in your writing
• Are unfamiliar with U.S. academic conventions for incorporating quotations of sources in your writing.
• Have received feedback that you need to incorporate more quotation marks and citations for quotations in your writing.

I’m ready to start learning!

This module should take 45-60 minutes to complete.

Passive plagiarism is another type of plagiarism, often called “patchwork paraphrasing.” This type of plagiarism most often occurs when writers do not properly paraphrase sources or include enough citations for their sources.

This module might be appropriate for you to complete if you

• Are unsure how to properly paraphrase sources or are new to APA, citing sources, or paraphrasing.
• Are unfamiliar with U.S. academic conventions for paraphrasing sources.
• Have received feedback that you (a) need to use your own word choice or sentence structure when paraphrasing or (b) need to add more citations of sources in your writing.

I’m ready to start learning!

This module should take about 1 hour to complete.