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  4. Guidelines for Students on Academic Integrity
  5. Section 2. Plagiarism

Section 2

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is the most common form of academic dishonesty. It means taking words or ideas from their rightful owners or any sources and presenting them as if they were their own (adapted from Hung, 1999).

Verbatim copying (also known as direct copying or uncited quote) involves:

  • copying the ideas, exact words, sentences, paragraphs, codes, designs, or audiovisual elements of a written piece, artwork, website, or social media channel without acknowledging the source.

 

Self-plagiarism(also known as recycling or multiple submissions) involves:

  • reproducing without acknowledging the ideas, words, data, codes, designs, audiovisual elements, or other materials that you have previously submitted for assessment or publication; or
  • submitting the same or similar work for the same and/or different courses as if it was a new submission.

 

Translation plagiarism involves:

  • translating texts, codes, lyrics, audiovisual elements, etc. from one language to another without acknowledging the source.  

 

Uncited paraphrasing involves:

  • rephrasing someone else’s ideas without acknowledging the source.

 

Mosaic copying (also known as scaffolding) involves:

  • mixing ideas, words, data, codes, designs, audiovisual elements, etc. of the original source with your own without acknowledging the source.

 

Improper use of Generative AI involves:

  • while improper use of generative AI tools is generally course and task-specific, asking generative AI tools to generate long pieces of text and copying and pasting them into an assessed assignment task is not considered proper use.

Basic principles

  1. You can look up ideas, arguments, facts and statistics, images, videos, etc. from a wide range of sources such as books, journals, reports, monographs, newspapers, magazines, websites, social media for your work including review essays, term papers, group projects, take-home examination, and theses.
  2. If you use ideas, words, data, images, videos, observations, and any forms of creative work which belong to someone else or are available at any sources and are not part of common knowledge, you have to indicate the sources (who, which and when) in the body of your work and give the full citation (who, which, when, and where) in the bibliography, footnotes, or endnotes.

 

Providing citations

Whenever you incorporate or translate information from one or more sources in your work, you must properly cite the source(s) in the body of your work and provide the full citation details in the bibliography or reference list at the end of your work (or in footnotes/endnotes, depending on the citation styles).

 

Citations must be provided when you:

  • reference information from various resources and piece them together to produce your own work;
  • paraphrase or translate either a small or a substantial portion of a text from one or more sources; and
  • reproduce specific words or phrases in a direct quotation.

 

Paraphrasing properly

When paraphrasing ideas from someone else or any sources, you must capture the essence and retain the meaning of the original information in your own words.

 

 

Using quotation marks in direct quotes

Quotation marks must be used when you reproduce word-for-word either a small or substantial portion of a text taken directly from a source as a quote. Direct quotes should be used sparingly and if paraphrasing fails to retain the original meaning.

 

For more information on when to use direct quotes, please visit:

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