Plagiarism Basically- Don’t!! We shall be sampling at least one piece of every student’s work during the year. Any signs of plagiarism found during marking will also need to be investigated.

Investigating Plagiarism We use sophisticated automated software that not only looks across the internet but also draws upon assignments submitted by other universities- so if somebody else has copied from a journal or a book it is quite possible that this can be found too.

Showing an example The following slides show the sort of output we can now get. Each separate source is allocated a different colour and the copied material is then highlighted in the text. Note that this fictitious example shows 72% of copied text which includes text which is in quotes. The amount of material actually copied was still significantly large.

example

Commentary on the coloured slides Material that is properly referenced and in quotes is perfectly acceptable and does not constitute plagiarism. However, we would expect the amount of material used in this way to represent a small amount of the assignment that you are presenting Anything that has been cut and pasted in without proper attribution- as a lot of this assignment was – does constitute plagiarism.

In Conclusion Read those blue pages and make sure that you fully understand what we mean by plagiarism We don’t want to catch anyone doing this, because where there is serious plagiarism we shall need to penalise. Help us by heeding the warning.