At times, students who write term papers cheat without realizing that they are doing so. This offense, even if accidental, can result in a very poor grade for the course and possibly further punitive action from the university; therefore, the student who wishes to avoid becoming a term paper cheat should clearly identify the academic boundaries in term paper writing.
First, students who are writing term papers cheat when they do not appropriately cite their research sources. This is the area in which students most often commit inadvertent plagiarism. Students do not have to cite general knowledge, which style manuals usually define as the information that appears in three or more sources, but they do have to cite the unique information or ideas that they use in their papers. Students should make sure that outside readers of their paper can identify which idea comes from which source; usually, the best way to handle this matter is to footnote or to cite parenthetically each source before moving on to a discussion of one's own ideas or the ideas of another source. The style manual should provide clear guidance on how to handle in-text citations.
Second, a student becomes a term paper cheat when he or she deliberately tries to hide the academic resources that provided assistance for the term paper. At times, students may not have to cite academic resources, such as if they hired proofreaders to search their papers for errors. At other times, however, they should cite the resources they used, such as the example term papers that provided some ideas or research support. Students should ask their instructors how best to cite such resources.
Third and most obviously, students who are writing term papers cheat when they submit third-party work as if it were their own, such as when they include sentences or paragraphs from other sources without including citations, when they turn in papers from the public domain, and when they pay someone else to ghostwrite term papers for them.
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