Originality: your own words and ideas
Academic integrity means being honest in your studies: you do your own work and give credit when you use someone else's. Originality means the ideas, the examples and the words in your work are your own, or are clearly marked as borrowed.
Why it matters: your teacher can only see what you really understand if you write it yourself. Honest work is fair to classmates, and it respects the people who did the thinking first.
What is plagiarism?
- Copying words exactly and not showing quotation marks.
- Changing only a few words and calling it yours ("patchwriting").
- Using someone else's idea, data or picture without naming them.
- Handing in work someone else made for you, a friend, a website or a tool.
- Using your own earlier submitted work again as if it were new, without saying.
You can use help to learn: ask someone to explain, then close the page and write it yourself.
Selecting relevant sources
A source is where you got an idea or a fact: a book, a website, an article, an interview, a video. Not every source is good. Test it with four questions:
- Who wrote it? A named person or an organisation you can check, with real knowledge of the subject.
- When? Is it recent enough for your topic? Old data can be wrong now.
- Is there evidence? Does it show numbers, references or experiments, not just opinion?
- Is it on topic? Does it answer YOUR question, at a level you can use?
Also ask: why was this written? A page selling something may leave out facts. Use more than one source and check that they agree. School books, museum and science-agency websites, and articles by named experts are usually strong. An anonymous post with no date and no references is weak.
Citing sources in research work
To cite a source means to say clearly where an idea or fact came from. Do it in two places.
- In the text: put the author and year after the idea: "Rivers move soil from hills to plains (Mehta, 2020)."
- In the reference list at the end: the full details so a reader can find it. Example: Mehta, R. (2020). How Rivers Shape Land. Green Books.
Quote, paraphrase, summary
- Quote: exact words, in quotation marks, with the source.
- Paraphrase: one idea rewritten fully in your own words and sentence shape, still cited.
- Summary: a short version of a long text, in your words, cited.
What needs no citation? Your own thinking, your own experiment results, and common knowledge that anyone can check in many places (like "water freezes at 0 °C"). If you are not sure, cite.
Your teacher may ask for a style (APA, MLA, Harvard and others). They all give the same facts in a slightly different order. Pick the one you are told to use and stay with it.
Try it: the honest paragraph
Write three sentences about a topic you like, using one book or website. Add the citation in the text and make a one-line reference list. Swap with a friend. Can they find your source from your reference? Check the 3D to see the tag parts: author, year, title.
Key formulas and definitions
- Originality = my ideas + my words (or clearly marked borrowed ones)
- Plagiarism = others' words or ideas shown as mine
- Good source: author + date + evidence + on topic
- Exact words → quotation marks + citation
- Other's idea → own words + citation. Always add to the reference list
Worked examples
1. Original idea: "Rivers carry soil from the hills and drop it in the plains." (Mehta, 2020). Write an honest paraphrase.
Mehta (2020) explains that rivers move soil from high land and leave it on low, flat land. The words and sentence shape are new, and the source is named.
2. A student writes the sentence above exactly, with no quotation marks and no name. What is wrong?
It is plagiarism. The words are copied and no credit is given. Fix it with quotation marks and (Mehta, 2020), or rewrite it in your own words and cite.
3. You find a page called "10 secrets of weather" with no author, no date and no references. Should you use it?
No. You cannot tell who wrote it, when, or on what evidence. Use a national weather agency page or a school science book instead.
4. Write a citation: author Anita Rao, year 2021, title "How Bees Dance", website BeeNet.
In the text: (Rao, 2021). Reference list: Rao, A. (2021). How bees dance. BeeNet.
5. Do these need a citation? (a) Water freezes at 0 °C. (b) The 2011 census counted about 1.21 billion people in India.
(a) No: common knowledge. (b) Yes: it is a specific figure from a source. Name the census report.
6. Your cousin offers to write your essay. You will hand it in. Is that original work?
No. Original work is made by you. Handing in someone else's writing is dishonest, even if they agree. Ask your cousin to explain the topic, then write it yourself.
Common mistakes
- Thinking that changing a few words makes copied text yours. Rewrite the whole idea or use quotation marks.
- Putting a citation but forgetting quotation marks around words copied exactly.
- Choosing the first search result without checking who wrote it and when.
- Listing sources at the end but not marking in the text which idea came from which source.