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Key Points from the Video Lesson

Plagiarism is a term you’re going to hear quite often during your studies at an American university. If you aren’t already familiar with its definition, plagiarism is essentially claiming someone else’s work or ideas as your own, without giving the original author due credit.

Identifying Plagiarism

In the United States, plagiarism is taken very seriously. It’s actually considered theft at universities and colleges because the student has stolen someone else’s intellectual property. There can be very serious academic consequences for a student who chooses to plagiarize.

This is not meant to scare you. We want you to have a successful academic career. Learning how to identify and prevent plagiarism will be valuable skills in reaching this goal. So what exactly is considered plagiarism?

Believe it or not, turning in an old essay or a large part of an old essay, which you had previously written for another class, as an assignment submission for a current class is considered plagiarism.

You may be thinking, “How is that possible? I was the original author.” Well, according to the American Psychological Association, this is still plagiarism: a specific kind called self-plagiarism. Students who choose to self-plagiarize can suffer the same serious academic consequences as those who plagiarize the works of another author.

See Plagiarism.org (Links to an external site.) for a few common examples of plagiarism that can be found at the university or college level.

There are three main strategies you can use to prevent plagiarism.

1.)  always turn in original work.

2.)  cite your sources

3.)  paraphrase

A Good Paraphrase:

• uses synonyms.
• changes word forms (i.e. change a noun to a verb)
• changes quoted speech to indirect speech (or vice versa)
• re-arranges the grammatical structure of the sentence
• finds alternative ways to restate numbers or percentages
• changes active voice to passive voice (or vice versa)