School Tips: What is Plagiarism?

What is Plagiarism? 

Most of us are guilty of this at one point in our student lives both maliciously or not. It may range from copying one's ideas directly, not citing a source, or it may also take the form of technically not just citing the source properly as in APA or any other standard format for citing your sources.

Just recently when I read about articles on plagiarism, I even said to myself, "Andami ko na palang nagaang plagiarism sa buhay ko." This thing with us college students is that we commit these violations because we are not aware of it. But again even our law states, "Ignorancia legis non excusat" - Ignorance from the law excuses no one.

So we, college students must be aware of what plagiarism is, how we commit it and most importantly, how to prevent it.

Plagiarism is the act of using other's work as your own.

According to Collegeuniversity.suite101.com, here are some actions that may be considered plagiarism:

• Putting one's name on someone else's paper. This is the most obvious example. Whether it came from one of the many college essay plagiarism websties that buy and sell term papers or from a friend, this is plagiarism.
• Putting one's name on someone else's phrases. One doesn't have to steal a whole paper for it to be plagiarism. Sometimes students get lazy and throw in a few paragraph or sentences from a book or website. If the original author is not credited for the writing, it's plagiarism.
• Putting one's name on something that's paraphrased. A paraphrase is a rewording of a phrase, sentence, or paragraph that essentially says the same things. Paraphrases of someone else's work need to be cited just as a quote would. It's still someone else's idea, even if the words are changed.
• Taking someone else's idea. This happens in academia sometimes. A graduate student has a great idea, and a professor steals it and writes a paper using the student's idea. Bad bad bad. It doesn't matter that words weren't stolen; it's the stealing of an idea that makes this a violation of intellectual property law.
• "Recycling" your old material. Tweaking the contents of one assignment to meet the requirements of another assignment is both plagiarism and against college policies. (And professors talk to each other about their students' work, so don't try this!) There are some cases where a student wants to expand upon an idea from another paper in another class, and that's okay as long as you discuss this with the professor and get permission, and as long as it's truly an original work.
• Failure to put a quote in quotations marks, or providing incorrect information about where a source came from. These are sloppy errors that are probably not malicious. But technically they are still plagiarism. Learning how to cite sources correctly is an important skill! if you do not know how to do this well, talk to a professor or your college writing center.

I also have found several free online Plagiarism detectors over the net which lets you compare your text to other pages of the web. One of which is www.articlechecker.com which allows you to paste your text and automatically finds similar phrases on other websites. I really recommend this one, I even found someone plagiarizing our research paper with this website.

Other free online plagiarism detectors include Tynt, Crossrefme, and Duplichecker.

Here are some tips to avoid plagiarism by eHow.com:

• Determine if the information is common knowledge. If the information has been cited in five other sources, it's safe to assume that it's common knowledge and does not need citation.
• Make quotations and citations your friend. If someone said those exact words, quote them and give them credit. Credit should also be given to artwork.
• Quote professionals, but provide your unique opinion and viewpoint.
• Do not copy and paste. This makes it easier for you to plagiarize. Instead read over the sentence a few times and try to put it into your own words.
• Put quotations marks around words or phrases you do not want to change and credit the source.
• Check your paraphrasing against the original text to make sure it is not the same.
• Do not purchase essays. You do not know where they came from or if they are reliable.