Academic Dishonesty question

[Adw28]

For one of my classes, our final was to write a research paper. When I turned mine in, my professor accused my of academic dishonesty because some of my essay appeared too similar to the sources I used. When I write research essays, what I typically do is I take notes and then convert them into sentences. What I’m guessing happened is that the notes I took were more similar to those I would take in class (as similar to the original) and not like those I should take for an essay (just the most important information) and I didn’t notice as I was using the notes to write my essay. I was allowed to redo the essay for a passing grade (pass pandemic). I was told that this wouldn’t end up on my permanent record and that the record that the Dean of Students has would be deleted upon my graduation. Other than having to rewrite the essay, there were no other consequences. I fully recognize that even though I had no intentions of cheating, the essay I produced still constitutes as academic dishonesty and have made efforts to be more careful on future essays. Will an incident like this negatively affect my chances of getting into grad school?

[drunkenduck]

If it's not on your transcript, grad schools will never know about it unless you tell them. There's no need to bring it up at all. If your undergrad school wanted future schools/employers to know about it, they wouldn't delete it from your record. So, just don't use that professor as a reference, be more careful in the future, and you'll be good.

[Sigaba]

On 8/24/2020 at 10:21 PM, Adw28 said:

For one of my classes, our final was to write a research paper. When I turned mine in, my professor accused my of academic dishonesty because some of my essay appeared too similar to the sources I used. When I write research essays, what I typically do is I take notes and then convert them into sentences. What I’m guessing happened is that the notes I took were more similar to those I would take in class (as similar to the original) and not like those I should take for an essay (just the most important information) and I didn’t notice as I was using the notes to write my essay. I was allowed to redo the essay for a passing grade (pass pandemic). I was told that this wouldn’t end up on my permanent record and that the record that the Dean of Students has would be deleted upon my graduation. Other than having to rewrite the essay, there were no other consequences. I fully recognize that even though I had no intentions of cheating, the essay I produced still constitutes as academic dishonesty and have made efforts to be more careful on future essays. Will an incident like this negatively affect my chances of getting into grad school?

I recommend that you read the fine print very carefully two or three times for every application. You want to make sure that you don't confuse questions like "Have you ever been found guilty of academic dishonesty" and questions like "Have you ever been accused of academic dishonesty?" (Based upon your OP, the answer to the first question is no, the second is yes.)

Please do not miss this opportunity to revise your note taking tactics. It's ever easier to make this kind of mistake and ever easier to identify plagiarism. The changes you can make range from using different colors of ink and paper for hand written notes or different fonts/colors/formatting for notes made using software. You can also document in your footnotes everything that does not reflect original thinking or "commonly known facts." You might also revisit the tactic of saying "I'll add the footnote tomorrow." To paraphrase Fritz Leiber, tomorrow becomes never.