What is plagiarism?
Most students approach their assignments with academic integrity. Plagiarism has been found to be only weakly associated with cheating (Caruana, Ramaseshan, & Ewing, 2000). Howard (2000) divides plagiarism into three levels of seriousness: fraud, non-attribution due to a lack of understanding of the conventions, and patch-writing. The latter is a mosaic style of constructing an essay from different, correctly referenced parts that some associate with plagiarism as it is an amalgamation of other people’s ideas. It is a common form of poor academic writing that does not strictly fall within the UTS definition of academic misconduct. Copying or buying papers to submit as a student’s own work are clear cases of fraud but are also the least common forms of plagiarism.
While there is a variety of interpretations of plagiarism the procedures to deal with academic misconduct have necessitated a clear definition relating to students’ work at UTS. Plagiarism is broadly defined as ”presenting someone else’s ideas or work without acknowledging the source“ (Coursework Assessment Policy and Procedures: 24). There are a number of penalties for breaching this policy ranging from receiving zero for a subject to suspension from a course or expulsion from the University (UTS rules 5.1 to 5.50).
Reference
Caruana, A., Ramaseshan, B., & Ewing, M. T. (2000). The effect of anomie on academic dishonesty honesty among university students. The International Journal of Educational Management, 14(1), 23-37.