Academic integrity, plagiarism and cheating
Good academic practice
Good academic practice demands personal integrity and a respect for scholarship. In order to assess your understanding of a subject, some forms of assessment, such as essays, theses and projects, require extended independent research. To do this research, you will have to refer to the work of various scholars who are authorities in the field. This is normal academic practice because all scholarship depends in some way on building on the work of others. You must, however, ensure you acknowledge the original authors of the ideas, facts, results etc. to which you refer. In doing so, you both respect the intellectual property rights of those authors and enable your own efforts to be recognised and properly evaluated.
Plagiarism
If you don't acknowledge your sources you will be committing an act of plagiarism. Plagiarism is defined in the UTS Student Rules as “taking and using someone else's ideas or manner of expressing them and passing them off as his or her own by failing to give appropriate acknowledgement of the source to seek to gain an advantage by unfair means.”
Plagiarism includes but is not limited to:
- copying words, or ideas, from websites, reference books, journals, newspapers or other sources without acknowledging the source;
- paraphrasing material taken from other sources, to change the words but keep the ideas, without acknowledging the source;
- downloading material from the internet and including it as part of your own work without acknowledging the source; and
- copying work, such as all or part of an assignment, from other persons and submitting it as your own work.
Take the Academic Integrity at UTS tutorial and quiz to test your knowledge.
Cheating
Cheating includes but is not limited to:
- copying work, such as all or part of an assignment, from other students and submitting it as your own work;
- purchasing an assignment from an online site and submitting it as your own work;
- requesting or paying someone else to write original work for you, such as an assignment, essay or computer program, and submitting it as your own work; and
- unauthorised collusion with students or others and submitting it as your own.
Plagiarism and cheating are attempts to deceive the marker or examiner. They are acts of academic misconduct for which students will be penalised as described in the Rules relating to student misconduct and appeals (Student Rules Section 16.2).
The UTS Students' Association provides free and confidential student advocacy and support for academic issues. If you are accused of academic or non-academic misconduct, you can seek the advice of the Students’ Association. They may also arrange for someone to help represent you at any hearings that you may be asked to attend.
