“Plagiarism, is a form of academic dishonesty and means the failure to acknowledge, whether intentionally or negligently, that one has made use of someone else’s work in producing what one has submitted as one’s own work”. (NMMU. 2013. Policy for the promotion of academic integrity and prevention of plagiarism, p. 2).
All of the following are considered plagiarism:
- Turning in someone else's work as your own
- Downloading information from the internet without acknowledging the original author
- Translating the text of another source without acknowledging the original author
- Copying so many words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your work, whether you give credit or not
- Direct quotation from someone else’s work, but without using quotation marks and acknowledgment of the author
- Paraphrasing or summarising someone else’s work without acknowledging the original author
- Unauthorised collaboration, whereby (for example) a student and one or more other persons produce academic work, which is then deliberately submitted as the work of the one student only
- Copying an image, to produce an image which is not materially different from the original, without acknowledging the source/creator of the original.
- Allowing another student to use one’s work so that he/she can present it as his/her own work
- Resubmitting your own work previously graded for the same or another assignment without referring to the original submission (also known as self-plagiarism)
