To avoid plagiarism, you should reference when:
You should also treat Generative AI as a source and acknowledge any use of it in your work, such as brainstorming ideas, developing a draft plan or structure, and translating text into another language.
The Academic Integrity Policy for students defines plagiarism as:
"the use of ideas, intellectual property or work of others without acknowledgement or, where relevant, permission."
There is a longer definition used in the Handbook of Academic Regulations (Part 3, Section 10, paragraphs 38 to 40), which includes a definition of self-plagiarism, part of which reads:
presents for assessment work which that student has previously submitted for assessment as part of the same or another module or course, or at another institution without citing that it was used previously
See also the Plagiarism page on the university's website.
If you plagiarise as a student, you may face sanctions outlined in the table of penalties reproduced in the Academic Integrity Policy – for students.
You may get a warning and a lower mark in less serious cases. However, for more extensive plagiarism, you could automatically fail a module.
Turn-it-in is a tool used by the university to assist in the detection of plagiarism for work submitted via Blackboard. It will highlight the text it finds to be similar to text already found in its database, and there are options to exclude text in quotation marks or in a list of references or short bits of text.
If you have access to the similarity report, you might find the student guide to Understanding the Turnitin similarity report useful.
The list of penalties for plagiarism highlights ‘close paraphrasing’ where your words are too close to the source material, which can be a grey area. You can avoid ‘close paraphrasing’ by not paraphrasing directly from the text:
(Of course, you also need to cite and reference the source when paraphrasing).
Close paraphrasing with a citation is included in the spectrum of plagiarism produced by Turn-it-in (it is number 10). Turnitin has a video guide to paraphrasing you might find useful:
Turnitin guide to paraphrasing
There is an Avoiding Plagiarism tutorial available on Blackboard which takes about an hour to complete. Academic staff should contact LIDE to register for the module.
Turnitin also provides PowerPoint slides for a lesson on plagiarism.
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Unattributed use of sources can undermine people's work and sometimes their careers. This is highlighted in occasional press stories, such as these examples:
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