Plagiarism: The use of words or ideas that are not your own without acknowledging the source of information.
Many students believe if you do not have the exact wording of a source, then it is not plagiarism. This is not true. Changing one word in each sentence,. changing word and/or sentence order, or failing to cite a source for any ideas or facts in your writing is plagiarism.
Actions that might be seen as plagiarism:
· Buying, stealing, or borrowing a paper
· Hiring someone to write your paper
· Copying from another source without citing
· Building on someone's ideas without citation
· Using the source too closely when paraphrasing
Actions that do not constitute as plagiarism:
· Common knowledge: facts that can be found in numerous places and are likely to be known by a lot of people. Material is probably common knowledge if
· You find the same information undocumented in at least five other sources
· You think it is information that your readers will already know
· You think a person could easily find the information with general reference sources
· Quotation: using someone's words. When you quote, place the passage you are using in quotation marks, and document the source according to a standard documentation style.
· Paraphrase: using someone's ideas, but putting them in your own words. Although you use your own words to paraphrase, you must still acknowledge the source of the information.
To avoid plagiarism, you must give credit whenever you use:
· another person's idea, opinion, or theory
· any facts, statistics, graphs, drawings
· any pieces of information that are not common knowledge
· quotations of another person's actual spoken or written words
· paraphrase of another person's spoken or written words
· Approximately 72% admitted serious cheating on written work (Rutgers University Prof. Donald L. McCabe)
· 15% have submitted a paper containing information largely obtained from a term paper mill or website (Prof. Donald L. McCabe)
· Approximately 52% have copied a few sentences from a website without citing the source (Prof. Donald L. McCabe)
· 36% of undergraduates have admitted to plagiarizing written material (1997 Psychological Record Study)
· Cheating on campus increased an estimated 7.44% from 1993 to 1997 (University of California-Berkley officials) |
