There has been a troubling increase in the number of cases of academic integrity violation, which spans from honest mistakes to worse cases where students know the behavior is "copying" but still do it anyway. Yes. There are real people who get the dreaded "XF" on the Penn State transcript. Penn State faculty and staff have become very alert and vigilant, including our own team of instructors.
Throughout the course, you will be regularly writing and submitting your written assignments, mainly your Weekly Questions and Reactions, Current Event Discussion, and Final Essays. Every element of the submissions should be either (1) your original work, or (2) properly cited idea of somebody else's. If you want to mention somebody else's idea in your work, you should follow an established set of rules for doing so. In this class, we use the APA citation style for all citations done in all assignments. More information can be found in the 'Quick Guide to Citations' in the 'Resources' menu. Be aware that the material you submit for this course will be compared with online material using tools including Turnitin.
In terms of quizzes, you need to come without any information about the specific quiz questions themselves and correct/incorrect answers to them. Yes, they are open-book exams, but the only things you can refer to is raw course materials and your own notes about them. Sharing answers with classmates, or seeking answers on websites such as Course Hero is an intentional violation of academic integrity and will be carefully watched for using a variety of methods.
Penn State does not exempt you from consequences even when the violation was done without sufficient knowledge ("honest mistakes"). So, please make yourself aware of what constitutes a breach of academic integrity.
Please have a look at Penn State resources (Undergrad Advising Handbook [1] and a web page from College of Earth and Mineral Sciences [2]) to see what academic integrity is and what consequences it might bring when breached.
As the heroine of Little Women notes, Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents. (Wrong)
As the heroine of Little Women notes, "Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents"(Alcott, 1868, pg. #). (Correct)
In this course, we seek to provide a learning experience to practice properly citing other people's works. One of the ways to do so is reflected in the fact that the citation information you can get from this website deliberately omits some of the essential citation information. You are the one who needs to look up the information to provide complete citation information in your submissions of Weekly Questions and Reactions, Current Event Discussions, and the Final Essay.
Typically, the citation on this website is lacking the following information about the cited material you need to fill in in your assignments:
Add a web address when it is an exclusively web-based resource (e.g., YouTube video clip).
In the below image, the first (wrong) one is a Google Scholar result, copy and pasted without any revision.
The second (correct) one is still a Google Scholar result, but I added missing information by doing an additional search.
This shows that 1) You MAY use Google Scholar or another citation generator, BUT 2) more often than not, you need to ADD to or EDIT your citation generator result to get them right.
Links
[1] http://handbook.psu.edu/content/academic-integrity
[2] http://www.ems.psu.edu/current_undergrad_students/academics/integrity_policy