35 Academic Integrity and Understanding Plagiarism

Looking for a visual representation? Review a graphic posted on Canva about the most common plagiarism mistakes.

Academic integrity is vital to the learning process and dishonesty will not be tolerated.  Any student whose conduct involves academic dishonesty will receive a sanction appropriate to the nature and severity of the violation in accordance with the Policy on Academic Integrity, which appears in detail in the Academic Catalog (available under the Academics tab on the portal). 

Upon submission of particular assignments, there is a similarity detection tool embedded in your course to help check your paper against other resources – this will result in an Originality Report.

What is an Originality Report?

When a student submits an assignment, assignments are checked against a large range of sources in order to find if there are matching text sections. Examples of resources checked are:

• Internet sites and archived internet documents and data
• A repository of papers previously submitted to the similarity detection tool
• A subscription repository of periodicals, journals, and publications

If matches are found, the matched text is highlighted and linked to the sources identified. It will also give an assignment a ‘similarity index’, which is the total percentage of text in an assignment that has been matched to other sources.

Interpreting the ‘similarity index’:

A ‘match’ in an assignment indicates that a section of the assignment directly matches text found in the resources. Given that students are expected to include evidence and examples from a variety of sources in assignments, it is to be expected that academic work will always contain matches resulting in a ‘similarity index’.

Matches could occur for the following reasons:

• A direct quote has been made in an assignment. Direct quotes included in assignments may be text-matched by Turnitin irrespective of whether the quote has been appropriately referenced. This provides students and lecturers with an opportunity to check that direct quotes have been correctly referenced. These matches also give lecturers and students an opportunity to consider how many quotes are appropriate for the relevant assignment.
• An indirect quote has been included in an assignment which is very similar to the original. An indirect quote is when someone else’s words are paraphrased. If a match in Turnitin occurs due to paraphrasing, it may generally indicate that the paraphrasing is too similar to the original and needs to be rephrased. It is important to remember that when paraphrasing, the author and original work must be correctly referenced.
• Plagiarism. While Turnitin provides a ‘text-matching’ service which may assist Lecturers and Tutors in detecting suspected plagiarism, the use of Turnitin will not identify an instance of plagiarism, and cannot determine if there has been a breach of academic integrity. Turnitin will only match text within a student assignment to text located in other sources (e.g. the internet, journals and periodicals and other assignments submitted to Turnitin), but it cannot determine the ‘original’ source or actually make a determination plagiarism has occurred.

If a student has copied someone else’s work, be it another student’s paper, recycled their own work, or taken material directly from some other source and made it appear to be their own; this is plagiarism. Sometimes students are tempted to use other people’s words because they don’t feel confident with their own writing. It is important for students to remember that their ideas, arguments and analysis are the key aspect of their writing.

For any questions regarding academic integrity, students should work with their instructors first. If they still have furthering questions, they can email academicintegrity@baypath.edu