University Policies on Plagiarism: What Every Freshman Needs to Know

University policies on plagiarism are very strict regardless of educational facility. Plagiarism in one paper can lead to course failure, disciplinary action, academic probation, and transcript notations. It's no wonder that students are motivated to avoid plagiarism at all costs.

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Students can use plagiarism checkers like plagiarismcheck.org before submitting their papers to be sure that their work is original and does not contain even one line of accidental plagiarism. However, before that final step, it’s important to find out what exactly plagiarism is and how to avoid it.

What Exactly Is Plagiarism?

Any student can answer this question with something like, “It’s when you took another person’s work and submitted it as your own.” This answer is correct but too general. To avoid plagiarism successfully, one needs to know more about the type of plagiarism. The main ones are:

The most obvious type about which any person thinks when hearing “plagiarism.” A person took someone else's text and presented it as their own. It can be the whole paper, just one paragraph, or even half of the sentence. The amount doesn’t matter, but the authorship does.

Even if a person didn’t copy-paste but paraphrased someone else's text without giving proper credit, it’s still plagiarism.

Other names for it are “patchwriting” or “patchwork” plagiarism. Just as patchwork involves sewing together small fabric pieces, patchwriting involves piecing together fragments of text from different sources. While it can be a technique in a literary text, it’s prohibited in academic writing.

Self-plagiarism can occur when an author reuses substantial portions of their previous work without proper citation, such as reprinting content across different articles or incorporating previous work into a larger document like a thesis. It might seem to be funny, but yes, people need to properly cite themselves as well.

How to Avoid Plagiarism

The most evident answer is “Cite everything correctly.” But it’s a view on the top of the problem, not its roots. So, let’s take a deeper look at why plagiarism happens and how to avoid it.

Sometimes, academic tasks seem to be much easier at first sight than they actually are. When a student finds this out and doesn't have enough time to cope with paper, it becomes a great temptation to save time by plagiarizing at least part of the work. To avoid such cases, it’s better to start working on paper with some time ahead.

Instructions can be unclear, and the task can be difficult. Or there can be other reasons that cause the case when a student decides that they cannot cope with the task and plagiarizes instead. Asking for help is absolutely normal in such cases, and universities are working to study students, not make them desperate and break policies.

Sometimes plagiarism really happens accidentally. A student might take a note from the source and then forget what source it was. To avoid such cases, it’s better to put quotation marks right after the note is taken and indicate the source immediately.

Taking a final look at the paper to check if everything is right is always a good idea. It helps to correct misprints, but it also can be highly helpful to make sure that all quotation marks are put, and all authors are noted.

New York Times writes that plagiarism is easiest to detect. While the previous point implied manual checking, this one encourages the use of online plagiarism checkers. It’s a good way for a student to be sure that accidental plagiarism doesn’t take place and won’t cause any trouble.

The lightest consequence of academic plagiarism is course failure, and no student wants that. The universities provide the rules for proper citation. And if anything is unclear, there are a lot of online platforms that have detailed explanations of direct and indirect citations. There are even sites that help to create proper citations automatically. So, it’s quite easy to cite everything correctly and avoid plagiarism with minimum effort.