ABSTRACT
Plagiarism is passing off someone else’s work as their own. The severity of penalty for plagiarism varies, but in extreme cases students will be given a mark of zero and prevented from retaking exams. The simplest way to avoid the charge of plagiarism is to be systematic about our use of references and to use quotation marks whenever we use someone else’s words. Copying from books without using quotation marks or references to indicate that words are not one's own is the traditional form of plagiarism, and it is still quite common. Even if we do this by mistake, perhaps because of poor note-taking that doesn’t distinguish our own thoughts from someone else’s, we are very likely to be accused of plagiarism if found out.
