Quiz Yourself: How Much Do You Know About Citing Sources?

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1. PLAGIARISM & ACADEMIC DISHONESTY

Which of the following describe incidents of plagiarism or academic dishonesty? Which are punishable under Amherst College rules?

1. You buy a term paper from a Website and turn it in as your own work.
   
   
2. You ask a friend to write a paper for you.
   
   
3. You can't find the information you need, so you invent statistics, quotes, and sources that do not exist and cite these in your paper as if they were real.
   
   
4. Your professor requires you to use five sources, but you found one book written by one person that has all the information you need, so you cite that book as if it were information coming from other books and authors in order to make it look like you used five different sources.
   
   
5. Your history professor and your political science professor both assign a term paper. To save time, you write one paper that meets both requirements and hand it in to both professors.
   
   
6. You don't want to have too many quotes in your paper, so you do not put quotation marks around some sentences you copied from a source. You cite the source correctly at the end of the paragraph and in your bibliography.
   
   
7. You have copied a long passage from a book into your paper, and you changed some of the wording around. You cite the source at the end of the passage and again in the bibliography.
   
   
8. While writing a long research paper, you come across an interesting hypothesis mentioned in a book, and you incorporate this hypothesis into your main argument. After you finish writing the paper, you can't remember where you initially found the hypothesis, so you don't bother to cite the source of your idea.

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Adapted from the Tufts Writing & Teaching Services Website. Used with permission.