DACC's Policy on Plagiarism
Danville Area Community College takes plagiarism seriously, identifying it as "a violation of the Student Code of Conduct," as students are advised in the Student Handbook.
[T]he College follows strict rules against plagiarism. Plagiarism is the representation of another person’s work, words, thoughts, or ideas, as one’s own. Plagiarism includes, but is not limited to, copying material and using ideas from an article, book, unpublished paper, or the Internet without proper documentation of references or without properly enclosing quoted material in quotation marks. Materials protected under plagiarism rules also include statistics, computer programs, artwork, theories, and photographs. Plagiarism also includes sentences that follow an original source too closely, often created by simply substituting synonyms for another person’s words.
What is Plagiarism?
Conceptually, defining plagiarism is relatively straight forward. Here's the definition for the verb plagiarize, from Merriam Webster's dictionary, which varies only in phrasing from DACC's own:
"to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own : use (another's production) without crediting the source" (transitive verb)
In practice, however, plagiarism is more varied and complex. Turnitin, a corporation that produces a plagiarism detection tool (used here at DACC), surveyed 879 secondary and higher education instructors about plagiarism. This led the company to identify 10 different types of plagiarism of differing degrees of intent that it designated The Plagiarism Spectrum. (Slightly more detail about frequency and how "problematic" the different types are can be found in the White Paper.)
Clearly this is more complicated than it might at first appear.
But 10 different types is a little more complicated than is generally helpful, so this guide will use this breakdown:
In addition, the guide will look at
Many students and instructors can define plagiarism according to a general definition. But when asked to identify it, they often do significantly less well according to this research study. Go to the Citing Your Sources link for access to tools that let you see how good your ability to identify plagiarism actually is and several tools to improve your and students' understanding.