Pupils are asked to carry out investigation into the area they are writing, which includes reading extensively then crafting assignments which are specified by their tutors to display the students’ understanding of the subject at hand. This will incorporate citing authors they have studied, paraphrasing those authors’ content and from time to time quoting authors to make points in the student’s assignment. Therefore, it is important for students to discover how to properly reference other authors as they could be accused of plagiarism simply because they have not successfully credited authors for the work they quote. For example, some students reproduce another author’s work without understanding that they are supposed to paraphrase and quote and give the authors credit, and feel that what they have done is within normal academic application.
Plagiarism can subsequently result from poor working practices by students or researchers who don’t check their referencing style correctly and cite other authors without giving recognition to their content. It can also happen when a student has replicated work from another source, such as another student, a textbook or an internet source, and put it into their own work as if it was penned by themselves. This is very likely to be a deliberate fraud rather than a mistake. Sometimes pupils will reword passages 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 satisfactory and if the initial author is not mentioned as a source.
It is looked upon as a form of cheating to plagiarise, as the pupil is trying to gain credit for something that is not their own work. This is why it is taken very seriously by schools, universities and also other educational institutions. Many schools use computer programs which check through assignments that are posted electronically and compare them to previous assignments from other students, textbooks and internet sources. The reports from these anti-plagiarism applications return a percentage match with sentences and paragraphs underlined so that tutors can see where the pupil may have copied 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 teacher will become suspicious if there are significant portions of content that are nearly indistinguishable to other sources and with no citation marks or citations given to credit the original writer. Sometimes the teacher grading an assignment is not the same person as the teacher who gave a lecture on which the essay may be based. Subsequently it may be the case that pupils feel they can rely considerably on class notes without being caught out, however when most of the presented assignments are virtually the same, this becomes quite noticeable to the marker.
Perhaps the most difficult forms of plagiarism for universities to identify is when a pupil submits an assignment that has been written by someone else. This counts as plagiarism under the classification of passing someone else’s work off as one’s own. Tutors might assume that the assignment has not been created by the pupil who submitted it if they have seen previous work by this pupil and the style is extremely different, or if the assignment is very well-written and the student has not reflected that level of academic knowledge in the past. This is problematic to identify though, if the paper has not been submitted elsewhere.
Helpful links:
- JISC – plagiarism resources and advice from the Joint Information Systems Committee.
- http://www.plagiarismchecker.net/ – free plagiarism checking software and articles, resources and lesson plans on avoiding plagiarism.
- PlagiarismAdvice.org – JISC’s specific plagiarism advice website.
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