APA Formatting/Citation And Plagiarism

Students enter the university with different levels of understanding and skills in incorporating outside sources of content or information into their assignments along with uncertainty how to cite and format. NLU uses the current edition of the American Psychological Association manual for citations and formatting. It is important to not automatically associate a lack of understanding of citing sources with plagiarism. In fact, most cases of what we perceive as plagiarism, are just that -- a lack of understanding or proper previous preparation around citing sources, paraphrasing, and/or attributing the work of others appropriately. As you encounter these issues with your students, please follow these important steps to mitigate the issue and provide this valuable information to our students:

1. Provide written feedback on the assignment describing the types of corrections that need to be made and connect them to appropriate resources. Student APA

resources are available through our library and a great resource to share with your students.

2. Reach out to the student to discuss their understanding of proper attribution—and consider giving the student an opportunity to resubmit an improved version in their own words with proper use of APA (according to your late penalties that may apply). Use EAB alert for “APA Citation Issue” if the work is not revised accordingly. This alert will be used for internal tracking purposes only.

3. If the issue(s) continues or a student outright plagiarizes an assignment, grade the item with a “0” and reach out to the student to explain why this is happening, offer to Zoom with the student to show them how they can continue to learn the valuable skill of proper attribution and to reinforce the beauty of their original work. Please inform them that future instances may result in a “0” for the course and is a violation of the Academic Dishonesty policy found in the Student Guidebook. At this time, issue an EAB alert for “Academic Honesty/Plagiarism Incident”. An academic administrator will receive the alert and follow up on the incident with the faculty and student.

A note on TurnItIn at this point:

TurnItIn is a great tool to help students and you in being sure that student work is original in nature. However, it does need some contextualization. For example, given the nature of our assignment prompts, most Similarity Reports will come back at least 20% for a score (because many students either in that section or in the past may have copy/pasted the prompt into their assignment before this student). Also, TurnItIn does not differentiate between plagiarism and direct quotations that are accompanied by a proper citation for one. So, you should always download a report, read it, and evaluate whether the score is valid before taking action. You should also educate your students on these items so they do not panic when they see a score of 22%. Need more information on how to set up TurnItIn? Visit our NLU TurnItIn D2L guide.