PLAGIARISM

It is department policy that a first instance of plagiarism will result in a zero mark on the assignment in which it occurs, and a second instance represents grounds for failure of the entire course.

This policy will be enforced to the letter in my courses. You should therefore make a special effort to understand what plagiarism is, and to avoid it like the plague.

In my courses, I will interpret ‘plagiarism’ as any group of words that has been directly copied from someone else’s work (i.e. a published work, a text on the internet, another student’s work…) and which is not within quotation marks (“”) to indicate this fact.

It should be kept in mind that ‘cut-and-paste’ (selecting from other texts a sentence here, a sentence there, and then rearranging them into a ‘new’ text) is an instance of plagiarism – unless, of course, the items that have been cut from other texts are within quotation marks OR have been paraphrased.

Paraphrasing will not be construed as plagiarism in my courses. Be aware, however, that paraphrasing is not simply a matter of substituting a few words in a sentence with synonyms. Paraphrasing means rewriting another author’s idea or a concept IN YOUR OWN WORDS. A paraphrased sentence will look completely different from the original, although the idea conveyed will be very similar. I should add that although I will not consider paraphrasing plagiarism, formally speaking any paraphrase should be accompanied by a footnote indicating the original source.