Plagiarism is a Theft

Plagiarism is one of the worst crimes againts the standards of academic work. To put it simply, it is a theft of someone else's ideas - use of other person's ideas without a proper reference to the source (typically quoting of an idea or phrase in one's own text in quotation marks while providing the name of the source and page where it can be found).

The Department follows the most strict strategy agaist plagiarism in order to prevent and eliminate it.

Punishment for Plagiarizing

The punishment for plagiarism at the Department is expulsion from the University.

Any case of discovered deliberate plagiarism will automatically lead to handing the case over to the disciplinary committee of the Faculty of Arts and the proposition to expell the student from the studies.

As plagiarism is a heavy academic crime, it is probable that the committe will expell the student.

What is Plagiarism

• Presenting of other people's ideas as one's own, i.e. not referring to sources
• Submitting a written work or its substantial part more than once (also called "duplication")

How to Avoid Plagiarism

• Always quote - refer to sources. See e.g. MLA Style for a referencing standard.
• When you don't know if you should quote or not, always quote.
• Refer to all sources. The primary ones (typically a part of a work you deal with, e.g. a sentence from a novel), secondary ones (typically a part of a commentary of a scholar about the novel in question) and all other works (i.e. parts of a related theory you are using) in the original phrasing (without alterations made by you - "direct quotes") or paraphrased ("paraphrasing").
• Do not copy from your colleagues.
• When using Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, write down the source immediately - it's very likely that you forget it later!!!
• Do not presume that plagiarism will remain undiscovered – there are search engines for academics specially designed for this purposes, they are called "cite-bots" (robots searching for quotes). Such one "bot" is installed in the IS.