Plagiarism and Collusion

Dr. Peter Hitchcock

(drawn mostly from guidelines produced by the University of York, Department of Computer Science)

1.0 Plagiarism and Collusion

Plagiarism is defined in the Concise Oxford Dictionary as: to take and use another person's (thoughts, writings, inventions.) as one's own. In an academic environment this is regarded as a very serious offence.

Students when handing in work for evaluation must not by implication or otherwise represent the work of others as their own. All sources, whether published books and articles or unpublished material of any kind must be explicitly acknowledged, and quotations and close paraphrases clearly attributed. In addition students must not by implication or otherwise represent work done in collaboration with others as their own unaided work, nor may any member of the University, whether or not they are producing work for evaluation, knowingly allow their work to be used without acknowledgement.

If an examiner suspects plagiarism, he/she must refer the matter to the Senate Discipline Committee with supporting documentation. The Committee will determine whether plagiarism has indeed taken place, and if so, a penalty for it. The penalties for plagiarism are severe. For example: a student can be suspended or excluded from the University, a mark of zero can be given for the course, a mark of zero can be given for the piece of work.

It is your responsibility to be aware of the reasons for attribution and the penalties for failing to give due acknowledgement. The School's guidelines for mutual assistance and collaboration are given in the next section and it is your responsibility to be aware of these and to follow them.

2.0 Guidelines on Mutual Assistance and Collaboration

The pre-eminent activities of a university are learning and extension of knowledge. In each of these activities it is necessary (a) to assess achievement and (b) to ensure the free interchange of information in oral and written form. These two requirements sometimes conflict, but do not do so inevitably: it is the purpose of this section to help you resolve any such conflict that you may experience.

Requirement (a) means that work you submit for evaluation must represent your own knowledge and understanding, and not that of someone else. If it does not represent your own work, it will be a waste of your time to do the work and of staff time to evaluate it. It may also constitute an act of plagiarism or collusion.

Requirement (b) means that, in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding, you should use to the full the published literature and the time and patience of your teachers and colleagues. In particular, the value of working with other students is usually under-emphasized: if you explain something to a friend, you may well do so more clearly than a member of staff (because you have a student's view of the problem), and you will almost certainly learn something new yourself in the process. Furthermore, work outside university is rarely a solitary activity: the ability to work on a problem with others is valuable and worth cultivating.

Behaviour for formal examinations should be clear. You have free access both to the published material and to your contemporaries during revision. Any collusion or use of unauthorized material during the examination is clearly a breach of the rules and will normally be prevented by the invigilators.

Assessed course work or open examinations pose different problems. As with formal examination, you should have free access to published material, and to your contemporaries, in carrying out the preparatory groundwork, but the final organization and writing of the piece of work itself should be done by you alone.

In practice, course work is not done in quite so orderly a manner: preparation followed by execution, but rather there is a continual interplay between the two activities. While writing, a problem that was not foreseen may be encountered and you must break off to deal with it. During the preparatory investigation of a topic or a problem, you will form conclusions about how to structure the piece of work.

Perhaps the forgoing discussions will have served to prepare you for the following guidelines.

1. Collaboration in learning, the sharing of insights, and resolution of difficulties, are desirable. This extends to preparation for course work.

2. Do not collaborate when writing an essay or a program. Do not copy another's work, nor allow another to copy yours (your responsibility is as great in either direction).

3. If in doubt as to whether you should give assistance, ask yourself whether a supervisor or tutor would be likely to give it.

4. When you draw from previous work (including software) of other authors, published or unpublished, you must acknowledge it. If you copy a passage of text verbatim, enclose it in quotes and refer to its source. If you use an author's facts, ideas, software or data, acknowledge that you have done so.

These ideas are now summarized in the context of writing first an essay and then a program.

2.1 Writing an essay

In setting about writing an essay, it is first necessary to select relevant pieces of information from available sources and to evaluate their relative usefulness and consistency. These pieces of information may, for instance, be facts or opinions or arguments. The process of selection and evaluation, often involving careful analysis and judgement, is one in which collaboration and assistance from others may be useful and is permitted.

Even though the group of people might reach a consensus after working together in this way (and they might not do so), once they separate to work individually they will probably produce very different essays. The final selection of what to include or to omit will vary, and so will the emphasis place on different points, the style and tone, and so on. It is this subsequent work, of the organization of ideas and their expression in words or diagrams, the structuring of the essay and its writing, that must be your own.

What has been said in the previous paragraph does not preclude discussion of (for example) points which you discover that you have not fully understood before starting to write, or of grammatical problems which may impede you. It is just as permissible to seek advice at this stage as it would be to consult a text book or dictionary.

2.2 Writing a program

Writing a program is a close parallel to writing an essay. Again there must be a first stage during which the requirements are analyzed and clarified, various algorithms and data structures compared, various language and other facilities investigated, documentation guidelines considered, and so on. In this, collaborative effort and assistance from those with more experience is desirable if you should find yourself in difficulties.

There follows the second stage of working predominantly alone, during which you determine the detailed structure of the program, invent data names, write language statements, annotate, document, design test runs and data and so on. Again, you will encounter problems: you will now know how to use the language to achieve a given requirement; you will not understand some diagnostic; you will be unable to detect a bug: again, discussion or assistance is valuable and permissible.

The use of standard programs or data files issued by members of the teaching staff will usually be permitted, but such use should be acknowledged in the usual way. In particular, when programming, do not re-invent the wheel unnecessarily: if a piece of code exists that does what you want, use it. If it is a significant and well-defined piece of code (say a procedure or function obtained from a textbook), you must include an acknowledgement of its source in the comment heading and/or elsewhere in the internal documentation. If it is just a detail, involving a few lines then it can be regarded as common knowledge and need not be acknowledged.