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Plagiarism

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Plagiarism According to University of Fairfax

Plagiarism is a violation of the integrity of academic community. Intentionally representing someone else's work as one's own or using another's ideas in a written paper or presentation without appropriate citations and references will result in failure or dismissal. While we should be able to assume that all students know what plagiarism is, reviewing it with them in class is important, especially in this electronic age which downloading information and documents from the internet is common.

We define plagiarism as "the use of someone else's words or ideas without proper credit" and recognize several types of plagiarism, such as:

  • Quoting directly without acknowledging the sources;
  • paraphrasing without acknowledging the source; 
  • Constructing a paraphrase that closely resembles the original in language and syntax without acknowledging the source. 

During Orientation, students must complete the Plagiarism Tutorial in order to help them avoid unintentional plagiarism in their writing by correctly citing all sources.  A more robust version of the Plagiarism Tutorial is also available in the Student Information Center and is available to students. In it are suggestions on techniques for note-taking and writing which help reduce the occurrence of plagiarism. 

Information directly from University of Fairfax: Catalog and Student Handbook