Plagiarism: what counts, and how it is caught

The definition is wider than copying sentences

Plagiarism is presenting someone else's work or ideas as your own — whether or not you meant to. Policy 71's glossary says the same: the intention does not enter the definition. Two things in that sentence surprise first-term students. First, "work or ideas" covers far more than prose: an idea paraphrased without credit, a block of code, a chart or image, a data set, a structure borrowed from someone else's document. Second, "whether or not you meant to": accidental plagiarism is plagiarism. "I forgot where it came from" describes how it happened; it is not a defence.

The companion definition matters just as much. Academic integrity is doing your own work and crediting everything you drew on. The two are not opposites on a single line; integrity is the positive habit (cite as you go), and plagiarism is one specific way of failing it.

Worked example — one assignment, three acts

An AFM 112 assignment asks for a short slide deck on a retailer's sales data.

Act 1. Aisha finds a clean bar chart of the retailer's quarterly revenue on an industry blog and drags it into slide 4. No caption, no source. This is plagiarism — an image is work, and the reader is left to believe Aisha made it. The fix is not merely a citation but attribution and permission where the licence requires it; a chart is the blog's property.

Act 2. On slide 6 Aisha summarises the blog's explanation of the sales trend "in her own words" — the same three reasons, in the same order, no citation. Also plagiarism: the idea is the blog's, and rewording does not make an idea yours. A paraphrase needs a citation exactly as a quotation does.

Act 3. Her friend Ben, in the same course, sends her his finished deck "just for the structure". Aisha keeps his section order and two of his headings. Both students are in trouble: Aisha for presenting Ben's structure as hers, and Ben because Policy 71 treats assisting another student to commit an offence as an offence in itself. Supplying your work to someone else is not a neutral act.

How each one is caught

Detection is more mechanical than students assume, which is why "changing a few words" defeats nothing.

• Originality reports. Submissions go through software that matches text against the web, published sources, and a database of previous submissions. Act 2's reordered sentences share enough phrasing with the blog to flag; the report shows the marker the source side by side.
• Cross-submission matching. The same database catches Act 3: Ben's deck and Aisha's deck are compared with each other, not only with the web. Identical headings and section order in two submissions to one course are a match, and the software does not care who wrote first.
• Reverse image search. Act 1 is found by searching the image itself. A chart with the blog's colour scheme and axis labels resolves to its source in seconds.
• The marker. A paragraph whose register jumps — two sentences in a first-term student's voice, then one that reads like an industry report — is the oldest detector there is.

What the software does not detect is intent, paraphrase quality, or citation formatting. It finds matches. Whether a match is an offence is decided by a person, under the policy, and the presence of a citation is the thing that turns a match from an offence into a properly used source.

Five acts to classify

1. Quoting a sentence with quotation marks and a citation — not plagiarism.
2. Paraphrasing a paragraph and citing it — not plagiarism.
3. Reusing your own AFM 191 essay in another course without permission — not plagiarism, but a separate Policy 71 offence (unauthorized resubmission, next lesson).
4. Using a classmate's spreadsheet formulas and building your own numbers on them — plagiarism (the work is the formulas), and the classmate is liable too.
5. Including a photo from a stock site under a licence that requires a credit line, with the credit line — not plagiarism.