Plagiarism

Plagiarism is passing off somebody elses work as your own, it is a type of fraud or theft, and it is therefore viewed extremely seriously by the University.

If you submit plagiarised work you run the risk of being given a mark of 0 for your essay, thus failing the assignment, and having to re-do it as a resit with a cap of 40.

Including sentences, paragraphs or pages that were written by someone else, without acknowledging where the words or ideas come from, is plagiarism.

Copying paragraphs from a text book, or reproducing another student's work are both equally thought of as plagiarism.

To guard against being accused of plagiarism, always put things in your own words, unless quoting, and use the accepted ways of `referencing your sources' to make clear where the ideas come from.

This means that you must remember to use quote marks for sentences, or specific phrases, that you feel need reproducing verbatim, and note their page number as well as the author's surname and the date of publication. Use quotations sparingly, and remember that it is only really worth quoting an author word for word if the way that he or she expresses something is particularly telling.

When you are taking notes don't copy long sections that you don't understand in the hope that they will make more sense at a later date. You are more likely to succumb to (intentional or unintentional) plagiarism when you come to write your essay.

When writing an essay, don't just rely on a text book or another secondary source from the library written by someone who has read a range of original material, summarized and provided an analysis of it for you. Even if you rephrase this using your own words, all the intellectual work of critically examining, selecting and structuring the material has been done for you. At worst, this is a form of plagiarism; at best, it makes for exceptionally unoriginal essays.

Using several sources and putting them together in your own way is one of the main ways you can develop your originality.

Text books are therefore a good starting place, they can indicate what some of the main arguments are surrounding a specific topic and what the key sources are that you should look at.

Lectures should also give you a sense of the main issues and debates, and the reading list is intended to point you to key texts available in the library. It is up to you to read a number of books, chapters and articles and then to use the material you have gathered to inform your essay.