The definition of plagiarism in accordance with the Oxford Dictionary Online is “the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own”. As a result, it is a form of fraud and must be stayed clear of as it is severely treated by educational establishments. This is the basic definition of plagiarism but there are a range of behaviours within creative work, literature and educational work which count as copied content. It is well-known for students to plagiarise without realising it, but ignorance is not justification, which means it is crucial for all students along with those who work within the educational and research spheres to familiarise themselves with the practices that constitute plagiarism so that they may prevent it.
University students are required to carry out research into the area they are covering, incorporating reading extensively then writing assignments which are arranged by their tutors to display the students’ understanding of the subject matter at hand. This will include quoting authors they have studied, paraphrasing those authors’ words and occasionally quoting authors to make points in the student’s assignment. It is therefore essential for students to discover how to appropriately reference other authors as they may be accused of plagiarism because they have not properly credited authors for the work they quote. For instance, some pupils reproduce another author’s efforts without understanding that they are supposed to paraphrase and quote and give the authors credit, and presume that what they have done is within normal academic application.
Plagiarism can consequently result from inadequate working procedures by pupils or researchers who do not check their referencing style correctly and cite other authors without giving credit to their content. It can also appear when a pupil has copied work from another source, such as another pupil, a publication or an internet source, and put it into their own work as if it was penned by themselves. This is much more likely to be a deliberate fraud as opposed to a mistake. Occasionally students will reword sentences from these sources before planning to submit them as their own work, but this is still thought of as plagiarism if the rewording is not sufficient and if the initial author is not mentioned as a source.
It is regarded as a form of cheating to plagiarise, as the student is intending to attain credit for something that is not their own work. Therefore it is taken extremely seriously by schools, universities and other academic institutions. Many institutions use computer programs which check through assignments that are posted electronically and compare them to past projects from other students, textbooks and internet sources. The reports from these anti-plagiarism programs return a percentage match with sentences and paragraphs highlighted so that tutors can see where the student may have duplicated work. It is expected that a certain amount of projects will find matches with others if they are written on the same topic, but a tutor will become suspicious if there are large amounts of text that are virtually identical to other sources and with no quotation marks or citations given to credit the initial writer. Sometimes the tutor grading an assignment is not the same person as the teacher who gave a talk on which the assignment may be based. Therefore it may be the case that students feel they can depend considerably on class notes without being caught out, however when most of the submitted assignments are practically identical, this becomes quite evident to the marker.
One of the most difficult forms of plagiarism for schools to discover is when a student presents an essay that has been penned by someone else. This counts as plagiarism under the classification of passing someone else’s content off as one’s own. Teachers may assume that the assignment has not been created by the pupil who uploaded it if they have seen earlier work by this student and the style is extremely different, or if the essay is very well-written and the pupil has not established that amount of academic skill previously. This is problematic to establish though, if the assignment has not been submitted anywhere else.
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