[MUSIC] In the first module of this course, we explored the concept of academic integrity, and saw that this concerns behaving honestly, ethically, and responsibly within the academic context in relation to the scholarly work that you produce. In this lesson, we'll look at one of the biggest issues related to academic integrity, and that is plagiarism. But what is plagiarism? Plagiarism is using other people's work, things like other people's ideas, arguments and opinions, and claiming them as your own without giving proper credit to the people who thought of and created the information in the first place. In defining plagiarism, Windschuttle and Elliot provide a succinct and to the point explanation. Plagiarism is a failure to acknowledge that the ideas or information being presented derive from the work of others. It is a serious form of academic misconduct. Plagiarism is most commonly identified in written assignments, but may also occur in exams and presentations. Plagiarism is an important part of academic integrity. Students are seen to have a responsibility to acknowledge those thinkers and writers who have helped them and shaped their thoughts. Universities pride themselves on being able to produce independent learners, learners who have critically engaged with bodies of knowledge and have developed their own points of view. When we understand this as a key value of universities, we can see that there's no educational value in intentionally plagiarizing. Indeed, plagiarism is the opposite of the educational values of the university and often evokes quite moralistic and emotional responses as it's seen as being similar to stealing. All universities in English speaking countries have a plagiarism policy, which defines what plagiarism is and how to deal with it. The following terms and distinctions are drawn from a survey of policies on plagiarism from a range of universities. Most universities will draw a distinction between unintentional and intentional plagiarism. Unintentional plagiarism is accidental. This is when students plagiarize without intending to do so, usually because of a poor ability to reference or a poor understanding of referencing. Or possibly because of an inability to paraphrase, or simply because they were unaware of plagiarism rules. Sometimes unintentional plagiarism is dealt with by asking students to undergo a course in referencing in plagiarism or maybe redo the assessment, or by giving a formal warning. Intentional plagiarism, or dishonest plagiarism, as the University of Sydney calls it, is when a student or students deliberately plagiarize others' work, and this is dealt with with much more severity. Intentional plagiarism is a form of academic dishonesty. Penalties range from failing the assignment through to legal action and charges of fraud. Intentional plagiarism arises when students pay other people to sit exams or write assignments, when they deliberately copy someone else's work with the intention of deceiving the markers into thinking it's their own work, or when they accept payment for completing someone else's work. In most English medium universities, it's just as much a breach of academic honesty or integrity policies to complete someone else's work on their behalf as it is to ask someone to complete your work. Most universities also acknowledge the idea of self-plagiarism. Self-plagiarism is when you reuse work that you've written for a different purpose. For example, resubmitting the same text for two different assignments in different courses. To avoid this, you should produce something new every time you're asked to complete an assignment. You aren't showing how much you have learned from a particular course if you use something you wrote or designed for a previous course. So what steps can you take to avoid plagiarism? In order to avoid plagiarism, it's important to understand what referencing is. Referencing is a set of principles and practices used at university, and in fact in all academic work, that allows you to acknowledge the work and ideas of others. It's done by including the author's name and publication details within your work, so that readers can see where information comes from. While the exact practices of how to reference might vary between fields, the basic principles remain broadly the same. Let's now look at what sorts of things need to be referenced, so that we can produce academically honest work. So, you need to reference any distinctive or unique ideas that you use in your work. Ask yourself, would I know this or think this way if I had not read this source? You should also cite any kind of distinctive structure or organizing strategy. Even if you're applying a structure or strategy to something different, you still need to acknowledge the original. For example, take the format of a television game show, such as Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The contestant sits in a hot seat, and he's asked multiple-choice questions by a host in front of an audience to win increasing amounts of money. Even if you changed all the questions, the prize, and the title, it would still be plagiarizing if you didn't cite the original source of this framework as Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. In a similar way, someone's experiment methodology or analysis of a concept is their work. So copying it without reference would constitute plagiarism. In addition, you should reference any information or data, such as statistics, definitions, or laws. Citing this kind of information adds to your credibility, because your readers can go and double check to make sure you're telling the truth. It's very important to reference if you're copied a distinctive word, phrase, or passage word for word, or verbatim. In addition, if you're using a statistic, a quote, or any kind of fact that's outside of common knowledge, then you need to cite where you got it from. Finally, the overall rule is when in doubt, reference the source. Now, we'll look at an example of an original text, and then at some students' attempts to incorporate the ideas into their own writing. We'll see if plagiarism has occurred and, if so, what kind of plagiarism. The text is from an article entitled Robot Revolution, Rise of the Intelligent, Automated Workforce that appeared on theconversation.com. Take a moment to read through it. Now compare that with the student's work below. This is a fairly clear case of plagiarism. The student has changed the wordings slightly, replacing but despite with although, and moving around the word order, but most of the key terms and phrases are the same. Furthermore, they haven't cited the original text. Here's another example. Do you think the student's writing is an example of plagiarism? The answer here is no. The student hasn't plagiarized the original text. While they may have used one or two terms from the original, words such as computer, that have given the idea of the original in their own voice and referenced the original idea. Now let's look at one more example. What do you think? Has the student plagiarized the original text? The answer here is yes, this is plagiarism. The student has changed a few words in the second sentence. But there's no evidence that it's written in the student's own voice. Rather, the student has just copied the original text and changed a few words. And this is not really evidence of independent learning. Avoiding plagiarism involves genuine engagement with the literature by reading the texts and then putting the ideas together with your own insights into your writing and into your own words. If you do that, you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that you're on the way to engaging in the conversation with your particular academic community. [MUSIC]
