Plagiarism Policy

Purpose of the plagiarism policy

The purpose of the Plagiarism Policy is to:

• stress the high value that VU as an institution places on the practice of academic honesty among staff and students
• identify the responsibility of the university to educate staff and students about plagiarism and how to avoid it
• identify procedures to handle alleged cases of plagiarism.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (FAQs)

1. What is plagiarism?

Plagiarism is the use of another person's intellectual output and presenting it as your own without proper acknowledgment. Plagiarism includes:

•  Copying out parts of any text or paraphrasing without acknowledging the source(s). This may be written text, diagrams, formulae, sound files, still photographs, audio-visual material (sound and image files), graphics/animations/multimedia objects, other computer based material, mathematical proofs, art objects and others.

•  The use of someone else's concepts, experimental results, experimental conclusions or conclusions drawn from analysing evidence or arguments without acknowledging the originator of the idea(s) or conclusion(s).

•  Submitting substantially similar final version of any material as a fellow student, whether the cooperation on a piece of work was part of the assignment instructions or not.

•  Falsification of results from experiments, surveys or other research methods and fabrication of data.

•  Self-plagiarism or recycling, where substantially the same piece of work is submitted more than once for assessment.

2. What are some clues that indicate that plagiarism may have occurred?

Some clues that may indicate that plagiarism has occurred include:

•  the use of jargon or advanced vocabulary or sentence structure

•  the use of quotes which do not have bibliographic entries

•  the use of incorrect and inconsistent citation style used in the bibliography

•  incoherent internal logic which lacks reference to the original assignment question

•  obvious differences in writing styles within the same assignment.

3. What do I do if I suspect a student has plagiarised ?

•  Prepare evidence of student's plagiarism and consult with Course Co-ordinator or Program Manager

•  Arrange a meeting with the student, Course Co-ordinator or Program Manager and yourself as the teacher.

•  Determine whether plagiarism has occurred.

•  If this meeting establishes that plagiarism has occurred, record the infringement on the student file and decide which of these actions should be taken

•  counselling the student

•  asking the student to submit further work

•  requiring the student to seek academic assistance from appropriate student support services.

Use your professional judgment to decide whether the matter needs to be taken to the next level and if so to arrange a formal hearing which has the authority to determine whether more serious penalties are warranted. Guidance about conducting a formal hearing, making it fair, arriving at a decision and deciding on an appropriate penalty can be found in the policy document.

4. What are some useful strategies I could use to minimize plagiarism?

•  Familiarise yourself with resources that may be used for plagiarism as it will be easier to recognise plagiarised work

•  Make expectations regarding academically honest practices clear to students from the outset and at multiple points throughout the course. Students need to be very clear what plagiarism is and how to refer to other writers.

•  Integrate the development of the skills of building an argument, critical analysis and using referencing conventions into ongoing teaching practice.

•  Keep the issue of academic honesty at front of mind and in an ongoing fashion through measures such as:

•  always modelling academically honest practices

•  including plagiarism statements to be signed by the student on all assessment cover sheets

•  regularly providing contextualised examples of good practice as well as inappropriate use of another person's intellectual output.

•  Design assessment tasks to minimise opportunities to plagiarise.

•  Advise students about the possible consequences of committing acts of plagiarism.

•  Advise students to seek assistance from student learning support services as appropriate.

Useful references

For a short and readable account of some very interesting issues from the point of view of students from various educational and cultural backgrounds (including VCE), have a look at the memo (live link) by Kate Chanock from La Trobe University.

Useful website links

For the Victoria University Policy on Academic Honesty and Plagiarism by Staff and Students - essential reading for all teaching staff:

http://wcf.vu.edu.au/LegalPolicy/PDF/POA040915000.PDF (live link)

For an excellent and readable discussion of the issues for Australian universities (including a definition of plagiarism that includes "contributing less, little or nothing to a group assignment and then claiming an equal share of the marks":

http://www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/assessinglearning/03/plagMain.html (live link)

For tips on teaching students to avoid plagiarism, with particular emphasis on electronic sources:

http://www.umuc.edu/ugp/ewp/plagiarism.html (live link)

These two sites contain some very useful and accessible hints on plagiarism and how to avoid it, including actual examples of how much you have to change a sentence to really write it “in your own words” (ie “paraphrase”); the Hamilton site contains

material that could be used with students:

http://www.hamilton.edu/academics/resource/wc/usingsources.html (live link)

http://www.indiana.edu/~wts/wts/plagiarism.html#original (live link)

For a site with suggestions for academic staff as to ways of identifying, preventing and detecting plagiarism, and including a useful bibliography:

http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~janicke/plagiary.htm (live link)

Plagiarism detection software

Turnitin is an electronic plagiarism detection service. When a document is submitted to Turnitin, it searches for similar text on the web, in ProQuest's ABI/Inform,

Periodical Abstracts and Business Dateline databases, in Gale databases and in some thousands of books in digital libraries. It also compares the assignment with others submitted by other students in the same class. It then produces an "Originality Report" that highlights matching text and identifies the website or document that it may have been copied from. If you want to know more, go to http://turnitin.com where you can read an introduction to the service (see "New to Turnitin?") and download user guides for both teachers ("instructors") and students (see "Training Materials"). If you want to use Turnitin, please contact Bernadette Trickey (Phone 9919 4387) or e-mail bernadette.trickey@vu.edu.au), who will advise you of the Turnitin account number and password for your faculty/school and also, if necessary, help you through the registration process.

To obtain an overview of currently approved teaching and learning pollicies, following the links in the Diagram.