PLATO: Plagiarism Teaching Online
To seek to gain advantage (more marks, better grades etc) by methods that are expressly forbidden. Cheats are only cheating themselves in the long run because they will be caught and punished. By cheating they lack the developed skills. As a consequence they have avoided real effort and learning, and when they start work this is exposed and adversely affects their career progress.
The mention, paraphrase or quotation of another author or authors should always be acknowledged immediately in the text and is called a citation.
In the Harvard system this in-text citation provides the following information: the author (from books, journal articles, websites, etc.), year and relevant page numbers if necessary, all contained within brackets - e.g. (Russell, 1961, p. 122) - and relates to a full reference for the source in the References section.
Your tutor will often expect you to cite and reference a wide variety of sources to support your reading for your assignment. Do remember to look at the sources listed in your Module Handbook and choose those listed under wider or recommended reading as well as the core, or essential reading. Use the journals or web sites if they are listed and ask your tutor or the Library staff for help if you need further advice.
Working with others to produce a joint piece of work in which it is difficult to separate the contributions of the different individuals. However, many people use collaboration to mean cooperation. Always check your module handbook to identify if collaboration is permitted or not.
Working with others or copying from others with the intention to deceive the tutor or examiner into believing it is all your own work. Sometimes working with others is required in whole or part by a particular assessment and in such cases is not collusion, but cooperation or collaboration.
a piece of information that everyone knows to be true.
e.g. "it is commonly known ...”
A list of the titles of the chapters or sections, at the front of a book or periodical.
Sharing ideas, material etc with others is to cooperate. In the case of the production of a joint piece of work, the contributions of the different individuals are usually clearly separate. If the different contributions are difficult to separate, it is more a collaboration than cooperation, but the words are sometimes used interchangeably.
To write down or make a photocopy of the actual words or pictures from a book, website etc. If this is just for your files for future reference, it is quite legitimate. It is cheating to use any such copy in your submitted work without a citation and a reference - plus quotation marks round any exactly copied text. If you change some of the words, or word order, it is still considered to be a form of copying.
A writer automatically has copyright in his or her work, and therefore does not need to claim copyright. If you copy someone else's work without their permission you might be committing a criminal offence. All that the original author has to prove is that they wrote and published it before you made your copy, and that you could have had access to the work.
However, UK law provides for copies to be used for academic purposes without seeking the author's permission, provided you only use short quotations - no more than, say, 200 words or so (though no limit is actually specified, the extent of the quote must be 'reasonable use'). However, failure to provide a reference acknowledging the source and author of the quote could still mean you are breaking the law.
See also Intellectual Rights
A considered assessment of a literary work in the form of an essay or a review. Or in social science subjects a systematic approach to an idea.