Plagiarism is the use of another person's work, facts or ideas without acknowledging the source.
Examples of overt plagiarism, as cited in the McDaniel College Handbook:
- Buying a prepared paper
- Taking a paper or speech from an organization's file
- Borrowing or stealing a paper from another student and submitting that work as one's own
- Copying whole sections or chapters from reference works
Plagiarism doesn't always happen in such overt ways. It often happens because someone inadvertently or incorrectly uses a source without providing acknowledgement.
*Examples include:
- Copying and pasting text from a website
- Copying and pasting a chart from a website
- Copying material from books and magazines
- Copying someone's spoken words
- Copying a unique or distinctive phrase
- Changing the wording of an article slightly (for example, changing "TV" to "television") and not citing the source
- Taking another person's ideas and presenting them as your own
- Including artwork or music in a project without getting permission or citing the course
*Taken from the University of Texas Arlington's online Plagiarism tutorial at https://library.uta.edu/plagiarism/index.html
