Plagiarism -- a Student Guide
The things you don't understand about plagiarism could get you in trouble.
DACC Has an Official Policy on Plagiarism
The student handbook includes the College's Official Policy on Plagiarism. Academic and professional business institutions take plagiarism seriously because misrepresenting others' work as your own is a form of theft -- theft of creativity, professional credit, and potentially theft of tangible property of value.
Plagiarism can happen on purpose (Intentional), or accidentally (Unintentional).
Intentional Plagiarism
Buying, stealing, or "borrowing" a paper or exam answer or other piece of academic work in order to submit it as your own work is intentional plagiarism. This includes things like:
- Copying an image, table or chart off the internet and including it in your own paper without citation.
- Copying music and putting it in your own video without permission (except in very limited contexts).
- Copying and pasting large chunks of text from articles, encyclopedias, books or web pages without quotation marks and explicit citation.
- Revising your own previously submitted work and turning it in for another class (or submitting one project for two classes at the same time) without explicit permission from the instructors. This is know as self-plagiarism. Besides being impermissible in academic writing, it can also trip you up with plagiarism checkers, like Turn-It-In, that an instructor might require you to use.
Unintentional Plagiarism
Students can stumble into plagiarizing. Often this is the result of failing to understand how they should cite their resources.
- It isn't enough to provide a list of references at the end of a paper or project. You must indicate precisely which piece of information is linked to which source of information. You do this through in-text citation positioned with the material you have used from another source. The precise method of in-text citation depends upon the style guide being used by your instructor. Most instructors at DACC use either MLA or APA citation. Check with your instructor PRIOR to submitting your work to make sure you understand their expectations.
- The Purdue Online Writing Lab provides basic guidelines on MLA and APA in-text citation. You can also get help through DACC's Writing Center or by using Noodletools (provided by the library).
- Avoid paraphrasing altogether. Attempted paraphrase is the biggest reason for unintentional plagiarism, because it is so difficult to do properly. Use summary instead, and quote any fragmentary portion of text in the original that is essential. And then cite it. Remember the key to summary is significantly shortening the original by crafting it in your own words. Write summaries without looking at the original text to make sure you are using your own words.
- Misidentifying the source of a particular citation -- not typically a problem in short student work, but it is very important to keep track of the source of information you are using.
Deciding When to Cite Material
The Purdue Online Writing Lab provides a wonderful set of basic guidelines about what does and doesn't require citing. These are quoted here at length:
Here is a brief list of what needs to be credited or documented:
- Words or ideas presented in a magazine, book, newspaper, song, TV program, movie, website, computer program, letter, advertisement, or any other medium
- Information you gain through interviewing or conversing with another person, face to face, over the phone, or in writing
- When you copy the exact words or a unique phrase
- When you reprint any diagrams, illustrations, charts, pictures, or other visual materials
- When you reuse or repost any digital media, including images, audio, video, or other media
There are certain things that do not need documentation or credit, including:
- Writing your own lived experiences, your own observations and insights, your own thoughts, and your own conclusions about a subject
- When you are writing up your own results obtained through lab or field experiments
- When you use your own artwork, digital photographs, video, audio, etc.
- When you are using "common knowledge," things like folklore, common sense observations, myths, urban legends, and historical events (but not historical documents)
- When you are using generally accepted facts (e.g., pollution is bad for the environment) including facts that are accepted within particular discourse communities (e.g., in the field of composition studies, "writing is a process" is a generally accepted fact).
"Frequently Asked Questions Regarding Plagiarism." Purdue Online Writing Lab, 2022, https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/avoiding_plagiarism/plagiarism_faq.html. Accessed on 29 Sept. 2022.
Help! My Instructor Thinks I Plagiarized! Protecting Yourself in Advance
The best way to protect yourself from a charge of plagiarism is by keeping copies of your work as you go along. Students used to keep notes, previous drafts, and other evidence of their work as a matter of routine because everything was done on paper. In a digital world, you want to make a specific practice of saving records of your work as you go along.
- Save drafts of your work. This is done automatically when you use a tool like Google Docs or Microsoft 365 to work on your project because you can view the entire editorial process by looking through the versions of the document. If you aren't sure how to view previous versions of your documents, ask your instructor, a librarian or simply google the "[platform name] view versions". If you use another writing tool that doesn't keep a version history, make it a point to use Save As when saving and store each version separately by adding a number to the end.
- Save physical copies of your resources if you have them (print out copies of digital sources -- or pages from digital sources) and simply keep them in a folder or store sources in a digital file folder along with your notes and highlighting to show your thinking.
- Store backup copies of your drafts in at least one different location (local and cloud copies or copies on a flashdrive).
- Protect your work from roommates and friends who may have fewer scruples and don't let people borrow your work just to take a look. Remember that you can get in trouble if someone submits your work as theirs. If you want to help them, help them think about the project by discussing it with them.
