SS 140: NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS                   

PROFESSOR LAGANA

 FALL 2009: ACADEMIC INTEGRITY AND OTHER THINGS          

          Please make sure that you read and understand this, and the other handouts, before you sit down to write your research paper . If you have any doubts or questions about any of this, please ask; it’s much better than not asking. If you don’t at least make an effort to follow these guidelines, the grade on your paper will be reduced; a particularly blatant failure to follow these guidelines (for example, buying a paper on the Internet or copying large parts of your paper out of a book or article) will result in you getting an “F” for the semester: no excuses and no second chances.

          A number of students in past semesters have made the mistake of thinking that they can take a paper off of the internet without worrying about getting caught. Please remember that your professors, especially this one, knows how to use Google as well as you do. In the same way that the Internet makes it so much easier for students to cheat, the Internet also makes it much easier for me to catch you.

          Whatever kind of paper you hand in, whether it’s good, bad or in-between, must be entirely your own work and not the work of anyone else.  Most professors, including me, are not easily fooled. If you borrow a phrase or a sentence or an entire paragraph from any of your sources, please make sure to put quotation marks around it to indicate that those are someone else’s words, not yours. The quotation must be followed by a reference with the name of the author, the date of publication and the page where you found the quote. Whenever possible, however, please use your own words and not quotes; I’d like see that you understood what you read.

          If you use ideas in your paper that come from someone else, please don’t try to pass them off as your own ideas. Indicate, by using the proper form of referencing (author, date, page), where those ideas came from. You have to give credit for the ideas of other people even when you’ve put those ideas into your own words.  There is nothing wrong with using someone else’s ideas as long as you give proper credit.

          You should also try to remember that this is not a high school book report or essay; it’s a research paper. It’s your job to tell the reader a story about some aspect of Native American culture or history, You can certainly express your own opinions but only at the end of your paper, after you’ve told the story.

          I’d like you to do a decent job of research for this project. You should use at least three or four (and hopefully more) references in your paper. These should be mostly books or articles (from serious magazines or journals). Please don’t write a paper using nothing but Internet sources. I want you to do most of your research the old-fashioned way: by going to libraries. Besides the library here at QCC (the librarians here can be very helpful in teaching you how to find information), you could also try the library at Queens College, the main branch of the Queens Public Library, or some of the research libraries in Manhattan. The grade you get on this paper depends in part of how much effort you’re willing to put into it.

          Also please remember that your completed paper must include a bibliography, a listing of all the sources of information and ideas you used when writing your paper. Anything you’ve looked at in your research (books, articles, web sites, etc.) should be included here. The other hand-outs go into detail on the proper way to format your bibliography; please read those and follow the correct format (alphabetical order by author’s last name followed by the date of publication, the title of the book or article, etc).

          Finally, please keep in mind that those of you who intend to go on to a four-year college will find that professors will assume you already know how to do all of this. If you don’t know how, then now is the time to learn how. The library here has a number of books which will give you more information on how to write a research paper. Librarians will be able to help you find these books. You will also find many resources online to help you write a research paper. .

          Remember: please try to at least make an effort to write a serious, college-level paper. And please pay attention to your spelling and grammar – read your paper over before you hand it in.

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