Plagiarism is defined as the "unacknowledged incorporation of another's work into work which the student offers for credit" [Statement on Ethics, Professionalism, and Conduct of Engineering Students] It is plagiarism if, in material you submit for credit, you directly incorporate material written by someone else without indicating in the text that the words are not your own. Direct quotes from ANY source must either be directly referenced or must be quoted with an appropriate footnote or endnote.

 

An example of a direct reference would be:

 

The Statement of Ethics that you signed at the beginning of the semester says:

The College cannot and will not tolerate any form of academic dishonesty by its students.

                  This includes, but is not limited to 1) cheating on examination, 2) plagiarism, or 3) collusion.

 

where "Statement of Ethics" is the source for the quote and the quoted material is set clearly separate in the text. By clearly separate in the text, this means that it is visually set apart in some way by the use of indentation, extra blank lines, different margins, or other means.

 

An example of a quote with appropriate endnote or footnote would be:

 

The definition for plagiarism, "unacknowledged incorporation of another's work," (1) indicates that it is the original author's words which are sancrosact and must not be explicitly co-opted without credit.

 

(1) Statement on Ethics, Professionalism, and Conduct of Engineering Students, College of Engineering,

The University of Texas at Arlington

 

Notice here that the material taken from the source is indicated in quotation marks, it has the footnote reference immediately after the quoted material, and that the source is cited in the attached referenced footnote.

 

The use of a list of references or a bibliography for a piece of work - be it a paper or a test answer or a piece of software - only indicates that the author REFERRED to the reference material for overall information about a topic or an idea. Citing something as a reference in a bibliography tells the reader that the writer read the other work in preparation for writing their OWN work. If the writer includes explicit material from the other work and DOES NOT INDICATE that the material is from the referenced source, then the writer has committed plagiarism.

 

In the case where a teacher asks a student to research an answer or a topic for a paper for instance, the teacher is not giving a student "license" to plagiarize. For a student to use a research source means reading and understanding the material in that source in order to formulate the student's OWN thoughts and words about the topic being studied.

 

If a student researched information correctly and cited the material that they read as a reference correctly BUT then they included that material DIRECTLY word-for-word in THEIR (the student's) answer (or 9-words-out-of-10 in their answer) to the question without indicating that the words came from some other source and were not their own words then the student has cheated through plagiarism. Putting someone else's words into your own answer without clearly indicating that they were someone else's words is plagiarism.

 

Additional information about plagiarism is available at http://library.uta.edu/howTo/plagiarizing.jsp