Thursday 6 December 2012

5. Plagiarism and Referencing (Who, Where, Why, What, When, How) – How I would enlighten a new college student


Plagiarism

 IT Blanchardstown considers plagiarism to be a serious offence. According to the Merriam – Webster online dictionary, to plagiarize means to steal and pass off the ideas or words of another as one’s own. It is to commit literacy theft or to present as new and original an idea derived from an existing source. It can also involve having someone else doing your assignment for you or copying graphs or charts from someone else’s work. While is it considered appropriate to read and refer to the work of other people all sources must be properly referenced. Quotations and summaries support your own ideas not replace them. In the event of plagiarism being discovered an inquiry is initiated by the course tutor and the student will receive a zero grade for his/her work. In an exam situation the examination board may decide not to give a mark to the person doing an exam. All students must be careful to avoid unintentional plagiarism through carelessness, copying the work of other students and confusing different sources. 



Referencing

The referencing system that is used by Blanchardstown IT is the Harvard System of Referencing. All written work must be referenced to avoid plagiarism and to give credit to the original author. You must reference to support your ideas and also to give your reader other sites to explore similar ideas. It is important when studying resources or sources of materials/ideas that you think about;
-          What is the focus?
-          Who has produced the material?
-          Why it has been produced?
-          When it was published?
Consider too that the sources may be books, newspapers, pictures, graphs, diagrams, journals or the internet.

The Harvard system of referencing is a two-step system of referencing.
1.      In text referencing or citations which are used within a piece of writing either before or after a reference to information gathered. You must give the author’s surname, the year it was published and a page number.
2.      Reference List – this is a list of all materials used for research presented in alphabetical order at the end of a piece of writing.
 

Reference List
www.itb.ie – Institute policy on plagiarism in assignments and examinations – 2003

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