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Academic Integrity and Plagiarism

The FSU Honor Policy provides policy and procedures on plagiarism and academic integrity at Florida State University. You may also find these resources from the FSU English Department helpful:

• Plagiarism Exercises
• What to Do If You Suspect Plagiarism (200kb)

Additional insight and strategies for preventing and detecting plagiarism can be found at the Higher Education Academy in the United Kingdom and at the University of Maryland's Virtual Academic Integrity Laboratory.

Plagiarism Statements for Syllabi and Assignments:

You should include the following at minimum:

1. a reminder about the FSU Academic Honor Policy,
2. a description of how students papers will be submitted,
3. a description of the way your department will investigate plagiarism, and the consequences of violations.

Detecting Text Matches in Student Work

FSU provides two Blackboard-integrated tools for detecting text matches in student work: SafeAssign and Turnitin. Each has relative strengths, though Turnitin has a more robust feature set and checks student submissions against a larger domain of materials. You can access either one from within your Blackboard (Bb) course site, where students will also submit their papers. After the papers are reviewed for originality, you (and your students, should you choose) can view the reports from within Bb. Both tools help instructors create a culture of adherence to the University's standards for intellectual honesty.

Using SafeAssign

In addition to the Quickstart Guide (217kb), the following resources are available:

• FSU SafeAssign User Manual (700kb)
• FSU SafeAssign Student User Manual (790kb)

Using Turnitin

The Turnitin Quickstart Guide (642 kb) explains how to begin using Turnitin and provides important notes and screen shots.

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