LibGuides: Plagiarism & Copyright: Plagiarism

Consequences of Plagiarism at HCC

Academic Honesty:

Students have the responsibility for conducting themselves in such a manner as to avoid any suspicion that they are improperly giving or receiving aid on any assignment or examination. Such academic dishonesty includes cheating (taking another's ideas and presenting them as your own.) Cutting and pasting from the Internet into a paper without proper documentation is considered plagiarism.

-HCC Student Handbook, Academic Policies & Procedures

Possible Ramifications of Plagiarism:

Failing grade on an assignment
Failing grade for a course
Loss of scholarship or financial aid
Failure to earn a diploma, certificate, or degree

What is Plagiarism?

To Plagiarize¹

--verb: to steal and pass off as one's own (the ideas or words of another) : to use (another's production) without crediting the source : to commit literary theft : to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source.¹

Basically, plagiarism is fraud. It includes theft and lying about it later.

It's not just failing to cite your sources in a paper. Plagiarism takes many forms, but the most common on college campuses include:

downloading a research paper
purchasing a paper from a commercial paper mill
copying a paper written by a friend, classmate, or sibling
copying an article from the web or an online journal or database
cutting and pasting information from different sources to create one document
faking a citation (writing a citation for a source that you did not actually use)
submitting a paper for one class that you have previously used in another class

¹"Plagiarize." Webster's third new international dictionary of the English language unabridged. Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1986. Print.