Plagiarism

Plagiarism is the act of representing another’s words or ideas as one’s own or failing to give appropriate credit to outside sources of information in any academic assignment, exercise, examination, project, presentation, report.

Forms of Plagiarism

• Word-for-word copying of someone else’s work, in whole or in part, without acknowledgment, whether that work be a magazine article, a portion of a book, a newspaper piece, another student’s paper, or any other composition not one’s own. Any such use of another’s work must be acknowledged by:
  • Enclosing all such copied portions in quotation marks; and/or
  • Providing a complete reference to the original source either in the body of one’s work or in a note. As a general rule, one should make very little use of quoted matter in papers, project reports and assignments.
• An unacknowledged paraphrasing of the structure and language of another person’s work. Changing a few words of another’s composition, omitting a few sentences, or changing their order does not constitute original composition and therefore can be given no credit. If such borrowing or paraphrasing is ever necessary, the source must be indicated by appropriate reference.
• Writing a work based solely on the ideas of another person. Even though the language is not the same, if the thinking is clearly not one’s own, then the person has committed plagiarism. If, for example, in writing a work a person reproduces the structure and progression of ideas in an essay one has read, or a speech one has heard, the person, in this case, is not engaging his/her own mind and experience enough to claim credit for writing his/her own composition.

In summary plagiarism includes, but is not limited to:

• Using published work without referencing (the most common);
• Copying coursework;
• Collaborating with any other person when the work is supposed to be individual;
• Taking another person’s computer file/program;
• Submitting another person’s work as one’s own;
• The use of unacknowledged material published on the web;
• Purchase of model assignments from whatever source; or
• Copying another person’s results.

Avoiding Plagiarism

To avoid plagiarism, a student must give credit whenever he or she uses:

• Another person’s idea, opinion, or theory;
• Any facts, statistics, graphs, drawings, any pieces of information that are not common knowledge;
• Quotations of another person’s actual spoken or written words; or
• Paraphrase of another person’s spoken or written words.

Direct quotations should be put in “inverted commas”, and referenced. Paraphrased or edited versions should be acknowledged and referenced.

Identification and Analysis of Plagiarism Guidelines

It is University policy that electronically-submitted coursework produced by students be regularly submitted to suitable plagiarism-detection software for the identification and analysis of possible plagiarism. The University holds a site license for reputable plagiarism-detection software and makes available to all teaching staff relevant access to the software. It is mandatory that all teaching staff use such software for all major student assignments and final project reports. Plagiarism is deemed to have occurred if the plagiarism score is equal to or greater than 15%, after all individual instances of scores of 2% or less are discounted. All coursework items that achieve a plagiarism score equal to or greater than 15% (after all individual instances of scores of 2% or less are discounted) will be awarded zero grades. The only faculty member who may submit a coursework item for a particular course to a plagiarism-detection software program is the assigned instructor for that course. No other academic course member should submit any coursework item that relates to another faculty member’s assigned course.