Every year some students are reported for plagiarism in many universities. If you are using ideas, diagrams, models, tables, quotations or ANY other material from a published or unpublished source, you must give details of that source. Use the referencing systems recommended in this booklet, and if in doubt ask a tutor for clarification. To fail to credit your sources is plagiarism, which is an assessment offence according to the regulations of different universities.
Another commonly reported assessment offence is collusion: although you can discuss, review or advise on each other’s work, to present the same piece of individual work between two or more of you is collusion (except the presentation you prepared as group work).
Here are the key points you should bear in mind to avoid either of these offences:
- Never cut and paste from a resource into your own work – even if you later change the words, students often get caught out.
- Always give the authors’ name(s) and year of publication in the text every time you use information from their work, plus a full citation in the reference list at the end.
- Never allow other students to use your work.
- Never copy from other students’ assignments.
- Never copy from previous years’ assignments.
- Never copy from assignments at other universities or from other modules.
- Never use internet essay mills or ‘cheat sites’.
- Never copy from books, articles or newspapers without full attribution.
- Never copy material from the internet, or from any other source whatsoever.