With finals upon us, the Writing Center is seeing even more students panicking than usual, and not always for the reasons you might think.
One of the most surprising and most common reasons that we’ve been hearing is some version of, “My professor told us that if we don’t cite our sources correctly, we will fail the final.” Recently, one student was especially alarmed. She explained that her instructor warned the class that they will “fail the whole course” if they get even one, in-text citation wrong.
Such requirements may seem like exceptions, but we are seeing a high volume of these instances recently. It has created some concern that such high stakes surrounding citing sources can take attention away from the task of helping students become better writers, and can make them afraid to share their voices altogether. We therefore thought it may be beneficial to bring the following to the attention of our colleagues:
- Requirements like these can send the message to the students that perfectly citing sources in a particular style is the single most important objective of a given course.
- If a student has included the author or title of a source that they have used along with the content, it cannot be considered plagiarism and is therefore not an issue of academic integrity worthy of severe punishment. Other errors can simply be attributed to mistakes in formatting.
- We have polled people in higher education about this subject and they have said that when they were students they weren’t expected to cite with this level of correctness until they had matriculated and were in their third or fourth year of college.
- When writing in a professional or scholarly environment, authors frequently need to be corrected on matters of style and formatting, and this is almost never a very significant matter.