Common Forms of Plagiarism

According to “The Reality and Solution of College Plagiarism” created by the Health Informatics department of the University of Illinois at Chicago, there are ten main forms of plagiarism that students commit:

1. Submitting someone else’s work as their own.
2. Taking passages from their own previous work without adding citations.
3. Rewriting someone’s work without properly citing sources.
4. Using quotations, but not citing the source.
5. Interweaving various sources together in the work without citing.
6. Citing some, but not all passages that should be cited.
7. Melding together cited and uncited sections of the piece.
8. Providing proper citations, but failing to change the structure and wording of the borrowed ideas enough.
9. Inaccurately citing the source.
10. Relying too heavily on other people’s work. Failing to bring original thought into the text.

What Leads to Academic Dishonesty?

When you’re starting off in school, you might be convinced that you would never plagiarize. While it’s helpful to value and identify with academic integrity, it doesn’t hurt to consider common scenarios that lead students to cheat so you can recognize and defuse them if you encounter them during your time in school.

Running Out of Time

Let’s say it’s the night before a big paper is due and you haven’t started it. An assignment that would have been manageable had you spaced it out over a few weeks now seems completely impossible. You truly feel that you have run out of time. You may feel tempted to try to use other people’s work to piece together a paper to submit on time.

Peer Pressure

Another situation that might lead you to academic dishonesty is peer pressure. Maybe instead of you, it’s your best friend who left her paper until the last minute, and she asks you to write it for her because she’s too stressed and tired to do it herself. It can be very hard to say no.

Pressure to Perform

Another roadblock to academic integrity can be the pressure to perform academically. Students can face an immense amount of pressure to achieve high grades, whether it’s to keep their academic-based scholarships, to ensure they pass a class they are close to failing, or to please their parents or other people who are invested in their academic performance.

Not Understanding the Definition of Plagiarism

Finally, students may plagiarize because they do not understand that what they are doing is plagiarism.

Remember, submitting other people’s work as your own or doing other students’ assignments for them does not contribute to your overall goals at school of learning the course material and demonstrating your knowledge. No matter how dire a situation might seem, be it turning in an assignment on time, or achieving a high enough grade to pass a class, there are other ways of dealing with these situations that do not require plagiarism.

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