If you’re studying at Swinburne you need to be aware of our academic standards and what is considered academic misconduct.
Maintaining academic integrity
Find out what you need to understand about maintaining academic integrity.
What is plagiarism?
Plagiarism is the practice of submitting or presenting the ideas, writing or other work of someone else, in whole or in part, as though it is your own work. That is, without proper acknowledgement of the source(s). Paraphrasing another person’s work without attribution is also plagiarism. The source of the work includes but is not limited to:
- other students – current or former
- a friend or tutor
- anyone you have paid to produce the work
- a written work or part thereof (including a webpage, book, article, database, pamphlet, brochure, journal, newspaper, lecture notes, etc.)
- a computer program or part thereof
- a musical composition, audio, visual, graphic or photographic work created by another person
- realia (e.g. objects, insignia, artefacts, costumes, models and the like).
Examples of plagiarism
- Copying paragraphs, sentences, a single sentence or significant parts of a sentence. An end reference without quotation marks around the copied text may also constitute plagiarism.
- Copying ideas, concepts, research results, statistical tables, computer programs, designs, images, sounds or text or any combination of these.
- Paraphrasing another’s work closely, with minor changes but with the essential meaning, form and/or progression of ideas maintained.
- Relying on a specific idea or interpretation that is not one’s own without identifying whose idea or interpretation it is.
- Cutting or pasting statements from multiple sources or piecing together work of others and representing them as original work.
- Presenting as independent, work done in collaboration with other people (e.g. another student, a tutor).
- Submitting as one’s own, all or part of another student’s original work.
It is also plagiarism if you submit or present work as exclusively your own when it has been prepared with another person, without acknowledging the source, even if it is with the knowledge or consent of the other person.