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Your responses to your classmates must be substantive

Sociology

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Your responses to your classmates must be substantive. Share ideas, explore differences, and think critically about your classmates’ posts. Bring in information from your textbook, classroom resources or other credible sources that you find to contribute to the discussion. You are invited to share relevant audio, video, or images in your responses. You must cite and reference any sources you use, even in your responses to your classmates. It must be at least 100 words.

 

PEER RESPONSE:

 In order to maintain academic integrity and avoid academic dishonesty, the University of Arizona Global Campus has a catalog with student rights and responsibilities that all must follow. This catalog is broken down into many sections, with some of the most important within the academic integrity violations section. The two areas that I focused on were plagiarism, and fabrication.

            The University of Arizona Global Campus catalog defines plagiarism as “representing the words or ideas of another as one’s own in any academic exercise” (UACG, 2015). Plagiarism happens when someone uses the ideas or language of another person or source that is not their own, without giving credit to the original source. This essentially means that anything that is not original thought or common knowledge, needs to be cited and acknowledge the original source. This is something that I have heard about many times in my academic career, perhaps even as young as grade school, but did not fully understand at first. Now that I am at the college level I understand how important it is not to use plagiarism, not just to avoid punishment, but to give proper credit where it is due, and to make sure that I can be confident in the information that I am sharing with others. This is especially important in my job as a teacher. I read many articles and journals about education and often share information with parents. It is helpful to reinforce the things that I am telling them with information such as websites and other credible sources.

            A sub-category of plagiarism is fabrication, which the UACG catalog defines as “unauthorized falsification or invention of any information or citation in an academic exercise” (UACG, 2015). This to me is an even larger issue than plagiarism as this is blatantly making up information and sharing that with others. This misinformation could be very costly, depending on the subject matter. The article that I found this week told of how Dannon Activia yogurt fabricated medical claims that their yogurt contained “special bacterial ingredients” that helped with digestion. In fact, the company claimed that their yogurt was “clinically” and “scientifically” proven to help regulate digestion. This of course was not the case, and the company ended up facing a lawsuit in 2010, paying out 45 million dollars, and having to remove the words “clinically” and “scientifically proven” from their labels. This was direct fabrication of information.

            As a scholar and educator, myself I will strive to continue to use information ethically and maintain academic honesty. One way to do this is to make sure that I am using credible sources in order to gather information. That will ensure that there is no fabrication in my work. I will also make sure to properly cite all of my writing that is not original thought in order to avoid plagiarism.