What Is A Plagiarism Policy? What Should It Include?

Plagiarism is academically dishonest and a violation of academic policy. Academic works are supposed to be the results of students’ thoughts, views, research, and self-expression. Students’ plagiarized content is not accepted at any cost, and these papers are subject to suspension.

Everything You Need To Know About Plagiarism Policies

Students must consult their academic supervisors or instructors when they encounter any problem regarding plagiarism before submission. Students are guilty of plagiarism when they borrow ideas, phrases, and wordings from other sources without appropriate acknowledgment of the original sources. They can incorporate quotation marks and proper citations to avoid plagiarism.

Institutions follow plagiarism policies to prevent plagiarism in higher studies for maintaining academic integrity. Plagiarism policies are there to support the education community.

What Should It Include?

• Plagiarism includes using one’s previous works or reproducing someone else’s already published articles.
• It also includes appointing or permitting someone to revise or alter the assignments a student submits to the instructor. Students can discuss a subject with the peers or mentors and gather enough resource materials before they start writing. But the aim should be to produce authentic, innovative, and original ideas of their own.
• Sometimes the assignments involve research, and students need to acknowledge that carefully. Unintentional plagiarism may take place, so they must use the appropriate indication of the origin. Doing small alterations while keeping the phraseology, content, and organization unchanged is plagiaristic. However, there are some exceptional cases for the freely circulated ideas in the public domain.
• Self-plagiarism is not also acceptable in digital media, rhetoric, writing, courses, and freelance writings. Students are allowed to pursue an area of inquiry from the prior studies. Still, they must seek mentors’ approval, submit previous projects with a plea, and outline new research issues to investigate for the same.
• University plagiarism detection should be used for every research work or academic copyrighted journals.

The original idea of a writer is considered intellectual property. All these expressions are subject to copyright protection. When someone uses a piece of music, video, or image without proper citation, it is considered plagiarism.

Often there are incidents like copying media, making a video, composing music, borrowing from other compositions, and performing copyrighted music. A person accused of plagiarism may need to pay a considerable fine or face incarceration in the worst cases.

How to Prevent Plagiarism in Writing?

Incorporating original ideas and citing references to the already existing works are the keys to prevent plagiarism. Below are some of the essential tips to help students write original concepts.

✔ Consultation with instructors

✔Planning a paper

✔ Taking notes

Students often find themselves in a dilemma and confused about the topics or how to deal with them. In that case, they must consult the instructors without further speculations. An educator is the best person to guide a student. If a student abides by the guidelines issued by the teacher, he won’t face any problem with plagiarism.

Planning, brainstorming ideas, and mind mapping are quintessential toward preventing plagiarism. Students are allowed to use necessary information from outside sources to enrich their papers. Outlining and thesis statements help formulate an interesting argument. Planning before work also helps establish boundaries between the borrowed sources and one’s ideas.

Students can gather class notes to prepare a research paper. Thus information could be organized beforehand. Any web address or bibliographic information should be incorporated rightly.

Citation of Sources

Educators always appreciate unique and innovative ideas. However, sometimes it is required to infuse some relevant ideas or quote a saying. Proper citation of sources is essential. At the same time, students need to highlight the originality of their ideas by making a distinction between the borrowed and unique ideas. Ambiguity in phrasing may lead to unintentional plagiarism. Quotation marks come to the rescue.

Paraphrasing is Plagiaristic

The restatement of someone else’s ideas in one’s own words is known as paraphrasing. It happens when someone changes both the sentence structure and the words without changing the content.

Paraphrased passages demand citation as the ideas are taken from elsewhere. Students have a misconception of hiding the sources they use to support their views. But, in reality, it is advantageous to highlight the borrowed materials.

Using quality sources can help one to make sound and more potent ideas. While writing, students must emphasize relevant points and leave unrelated information.

Analyzing the Sources

Students must evaluate and analyze a source before taking information from it. Not all authorities are relevant. The source one relies upon must support the ideas, provide accurate information, and enrich the writing standard. 

Plagiarism Policy Inclusions

Plagiarism is close imitation or unauthorized use of thoughts and languages of other writers and representing them as one’s own. Plagiarism policy in colleges and universities includes penalties, suspensions and students must be aware of the consequences.

Plagiarism policy should include an entire investigation of the crime, the study of the investigation results, confidentiality, and preventive stages. Psychiatrists, legal authorities, and social science experts must be there in the policy-making term to consider all the aspects of plagiarism.

Plagiarism is unethical and immoral. People must be educated regarding the crime of plagiarism. Various free plagiarism scanners are widely available that help students detect plagiarism in their articles.

The accurate, authentic, and fast similarity checker like Copyleaks generates a plagiarism report with its A. I and Machine Learning-driven algorithms. It is reliable for its platform integration, automated grading tool, and robust A.P.I.

Apart from educators, students can also take help from librarians and discuss topics with peers. Plagiarism is unlawful. Nowadays, the availability of information across various websites and databases is another major problem that has given rise to plagiarism. Students must check their research papers manually or use the plagiarism checker software before submission.

Final Takeaways

Some people plagiarize without knowing the consequences, while others do it even after knowing it is a crime.

They lack the energy, time, and effort to work independently and feel it better to steal ideas from others. Plagiarism policies must encourage students to think and write their views in academic papers.