|
|
| Format |
Zipped |
Unzipped |
| PDF |
 |
 |
What is Plagiarism? Failure to acknowledge your sources
of ideas, quotes or illustrations, etc is likely to lead to a suspicion
of plagiarism.
Plagiarism is taking and using another person’s
thoughts, ideas, arguments, writings or creations and passing them off
as your own. In the case of copyright material (e.g. web content)
plagiarism is illegal. Plagiarism is theft of another person’s
intellectual property and in the academic environment it is taken very
seriously. All assignments and essays are checked for plagiarism and it
can lead to you being failed from your course.
It is very easy to avoid being suspected of plagiarism –
simply cite and reference correctly!
-
Students who are fully aware that their actions
constitute plagiarism (for example, copying published information
into a paper without source attribution for the purpose of claiming
the information as their own, or turning in material written by
another student) are guilty of academic misconduct. Refer to
academic rules for penalties.
-
Students may fear failure or fear taking risks in
their own work.
-
Students may have poor time-management skills or
they may plan poorly for the time and effort required for
research-based writing, and believe they have no choice but to
plagiarize.
-
Students may view the course, the assignment, the
conventions of academic documentation, or the consequences of
cheating as unimportant.
-
Students are not guilty of plagiarism when they try
in good faith to acknowledge others’ work but fail to do so
accurately or fully. These failures are largely the result of
failures in prior teaching and learning: students lack the knowledge
of and/or the ability to use the conventions of authorial
attribution. The following conditions and practices may result in
texts that falsely appear to represent plagiarism as it has been
defined:
-
Students may not know how to integrate the ideas of
others and document the sources of those ideas appropriately in
their texts.
-
Students may not know how to take careful and fully
documented notes during their research.
-
Tutors may define plagiarism differently or more
stringently than have instructors or administrators in students’
earlier education or in other writing situations.
-
In some settings, using other people’s words or
ideas as their own is an acceptable practice for writers of certain
kinds of texts (for example, organizational documents), making the
concepts of plagiarism and documentation less clear cut than
academics often acknowledge and thereby confusing students who have
not learned that the conventions of source attribution vary in
different contexts.
To avoid plagiarism, you must give credit whenever you
use
-
another person’s idea, opinion, or theory;
-
any facts, statistics, graphs, drawings (in fact 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.
-
Put in quotations everything that comes directly
from the text especially when taking notes.
-
Paraphrase, but be sure you are not just rearranging
or replacing a few words.
-
Check your paraphrase against the original text to
be sure you have not accidentally used the same phrases or words,
and that the information is accurate.
-
Always acknowledge facts, diagrams and original
thought
UHI Plagiarism resources
HTC B.A. Student Programme Handbook, § 6, “Academic Misconduct”.
|
