Remember that plagiarism is just one of the eight areas of academic integrity.
What is Plagiarism?
Plagiarism is when you take another person's words or ideas and try to pass them off as your own. This includes taking information from web pages, articles, books, blogs, or any other source, and not giving credit to the original author.
Whenever you quote, paraphrase, or summarize another person's work, you need to cite the source within your paper. It is not enough to just list the source in the References or Works Cited at the end of your paper. Failing to properly cite someone else's words and ideas at the point they show up in your paper is plagiarism.
The UAGC Catalog provides extensive details on academic integrity violations and consequences.
How Can I Ensure I am Not Plagiarizing?
- Use in-text citations (citations within the text of the paper)any time you paraphrase or quote to show where the original idea or information came from. Use the formatting style required for your assignment.
- Place quotation marks around all wording that is copied word-for-word from a source.
- Correctly paraphrase any information you obtained from a source. Remember that a paraphrase is more than just changing every few words.
- Do not purchase writing and present it as your own work.
- Do not reuse assignments from a previous course without your instructor’s permission.
- Do not let other students borrow, copy, or reuse your past assignment.
- Use Turnitin (see section below).
- Do not allow a tutor or any others to collaborate with you on completing an assignment, edit or complete any of your writing for you, summarize any of your required readings for you, or provide you with sources to use for your paper.
For more help avoiding plagiarism, follow the steps outlined in our Academic Integrity Roadmap.
What is Turnitin?
Turnitin is a tool that helps identify possible plagiarism within an assignment. This tool compares students’ work with texts available online, in our university’s internal database, as well as any assignment submitted to Turnitin. See more on our Understanding Turnitin page, which shows how to access Turnitin and how to understand a Turnitin report.
See the programs and degrees available at UAGC.
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Plagarism