Academic Integrity and Plagiarism Resources

This page contains resources to assist you in reducing the incidence of plagiarism in your courses, primarily through better assessment and feedback practices and clear policies, and secondarily through effective detection. Additional information is available from the VUW Academic Integrity webpages.

What is Plagiarism?

Plagiarism is presenting someone else’s work as if it were your own, whether you mean to or not.

‘Someone else’s work’ means anything that is not your own idea. Even if it is presented in your own style, you must still acknowledge your sources fully and appropriately. This includes:

• material from books, journals or any other printed source
• the work of other students or staff
• information from the Internet
• software programs and other electronic material
• designs and ideas
• the organisation or structuring of any such material.

Plagiarism undermines academic integrity simply because it is a form of lying, stealing and mistreating others. Plagiarism involves stealing other people’s intellectual property and lying about whose work it is. This is why plagiarism is prohibited at Victoria.

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Materials for discussing plagiarism with your students

• VUW Avoiding Plagiarism Brochure [2MB PDF]
• Definition of plagiarism Powerpoint slides
• Drawing the line Powerpoint slides

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Detecting plagiarism

• Plagiarism detection checklist
• Turnitin plagiarism detection

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Useful web sites for further reading

Dalhousie resources on plagiarism - these are excellent
http://academicintegrity.dal.ca/Faculty%20Resources/

Examples of good and bad practice
http://www.indiana.edu/~istd/

Robert Harris: The Plagiarism Handbook: Strategies for Preventing, Detecting, and Dealing with Plagiarism
http://www.antiplagiarism.com/

Other institutional plagiarism sites:

• http://www.stanford.edu/dept/vpsa/judicialaffairs/students/plagiarism.htm
• http://www.brookes.ac.uk/services/ocsd/4_resource/plagiarism.html
• http://www.adelaide.edu.au/ltdu/staff/plagiarism/
• http://www.rmit.edu.au/teachingandlearning/links/academicintegrity

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