Plagiarism & Copyright

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

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.

The HCC Library has created the Online Plagiarism Workshop available through Moodle.

Please login to your Moodle account, search for the course titled:

Online Plagiarism Workshop

and self-enroll. At the end of the workshop, you will receive a

certificate of completion.

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Check our our Citation Styles guide!