Academic integrity means honesty in the work that you do as a student. In short, it requires you to distinguish your own ideas and discoveries from those that you have borrowed from other people. History, in common with other disciplines, considers academic integrity to be the foundation for learning and scholarship. Abuses of academic integrity include everything from submitting an entire paper that is not your own new work to using other people’s ideas without giving them proper credit.

Plagiarism is one of the most frequent violations of academic integrity in history classes. If you use someone else’s exact words, you must put the copied text within quotation marks and identify where you found it. If you paraphrase (restate someone else’s ideas in your own words), you must indicate that you have done so and identify where the paraphrased material originated. If you are influenced by someone else’s interpretation or if you use someone else’s footnotes to identify sources for your own research, you must acknowledge that in your paper. For helpful examples of plagiarism and how to avoid it, see the Appendix to the UNC Charlotte Code of Academic Integrity.

For detailed information on expectations and policies regarding the full range of issues involved in academic integrity, see the Student Guidelines to the UNC Charlotte Code of Academic Integrity