Plagiarism

Before starting college I had never understood what plagiarism was.  My first week was an eye opener.  Almost every lecturer gave a class or at least mentioned plagiarism and referencing.  I knew then that it was serious. At ITB plagiarism is highly frowned upon and apart from losing marks on assignments, a student could be expelled for more serious cases.  Read on to find out what plagiarism is and how to avoid it.

What is plagiarism?

To put it simply it is when you use someone else’s work, ideas or words and pass it off as your own.  Copying or borrowing anyone else’s work without giving them credit is plagiarism.  

Samples of plagiarism:

Downloading information, videos or pictures from Internet sites without referencing the site.

Copying information, ideas or quotations from a book, journal, newspaper or magazine article and not acknowledging the author.

Copying someone else’s paper or buying a paper on the internet and turning it in as your own work.

How to avoid plagiarism:

Use quotation marks every time you copy a sentence or paragraph directly from a book, journal, article etc. and reference the source according to the
Harvard Referencing style.

Paraphrasing:  If you put someone else’s work into your own words you must always reference the source.  Don’t try and take the easy route and re-arrange a few words, it must be re-written in your own words and referenced.

Never download information from the internet and pass it off as your own.  ITB and most other colleges use a system called Turn-it-in which allows them to check if the information is plagiarised.  It scans the document and compares it to everything on the world-wide-web - and you know how big that is!


Referencing:  I found this the most difficult part of writing assignments.  I could not get my head around having to put every full stop and comma in the right place.  Our lecturer gave us a very handy guide that made life a bit easier.  It covers everything that you might come up against.  Click here for a copy, print it off and keep it beside you when writing all your assignments.

Finally:

When writing assignments you have to put across the fact that you understand the topic but you can’t fall into the trap of passing off other peoples work as your own.  It is favoured and often required that you use other people’s ideas and theories in writing your assignment.  You can do this quite simply; reference, reference, reference.

Never plagiarise! It’s just not worth it!