5.3 Fair Use and Academic Honesty

Fair use for students means that:

• you can make one copy of a printed work for personal study,
• you can quote and paraphrase someone else's work in your own writing as long as you give credit to the original author and also as long as your quotations are brief.

Academic Honesty

To present someone else's work or ideas as your own is dishonest, and in extreme cases, illegal. This kind of dishonesty is called plagiarism. Jefferson Community College takes cases of plagiarism very seriously and allows academic penalties for it, including a failing grade for the course in which the plagiarism occurred.

Academic Honesty (Academic Policies and Procedures - Jefferson Community College) Link opens a new window.

But at the same time it is very easy to protect yourself against plagiarism. All you have to do is give credit to the sources that you used. Giving proper credit will also boost your credibility in the eyes of your professor, since this demonstrates that you have read and understood the required material, and also demonstrates that you are learning how to read and write in your professor's subject discipline.

Giving full credit to a source requires two things:

• A reference in your paper where you use the borrowed information.
• A bibliographic description or citation of the source at the end of your paper.

Click "Next" to continue.