Using any standardized citation style is helpful in preventing plagiarism or academic dishonesty. According to the Virtual Academic Integrity Library, using APA style ensures that the person who wrote the sources you are referencing receives due credit for their intellectual contributions.
By properly using APA citations in your research paper, you are protecting yourself from being accused of plagiarism. Your professor will be able to identify which ideas are your own, which ones you borrowed and from where.
The point of an APA citation, besides providing credit, is to point a reader toward your source material as easily as possible. If you reference a scholarly journal article that would be helpful for someone else, for example, she will be able to locate it using the information included in your citation.
According to the Purdue online writing lab, APA style defines a set of formatting guidelines for papers, like use of 1-inch margin on all sides of the document or including a header on every page. These guidelines help to ensure that your professor receives all papers in the same format, which makes grading easier. According to the University of Wisconsin-Madison writing center, if you choose to pursue a career in the social sciences, using APA style is required to make typesetting easier for editorial staff of APA journals.
Learning to use APA style is helpful for teaching students how to understand academic references in general. These skills will be valuable when a student needs to locate a source based off of someone else's research paper, because he will understand how to decipher their citations.