plagiarism in university essay

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Cheating and plagiarism at university

What counts as cheating or plagiarism what are the penalties and consequences for you and your university career.

How and why do students cheat?

Using ai such as chatgpt – is that cheating, why is cheating a bad idea, what is accidental plagiarism.

Cheating is a deliberate and dishonest act. At university this could mean copying someone else’s work, having someone write an essay for you or taking notes to an exam.

Plagiarism is presenting someone else’s work as your own without their permission, either deliberately or accidentally.

The most common form of cheating is the use of essay mills. These companies allow students to pay someone to write their essay and then submit it as their own. Essay mills target stressed students who are overwhelmed with work by presenting cheating as an acceptable alternative to working hard.

The UK Government has stepped in to make essay mills illegal under UK law in April 2022. Now, organisations attempting to provide such a service will be criminally penalised.

Students who don’t revise enough, or leave their essay until the last minute, may think using an essay mill is easier than doing more work in a short space of time – extenuating circumstances can put students in a situation where cheating feels like their only option. Cheating is never acceptable or worth the risk. 

• Revision tips
• Mental health at university

ChatGPT and Bard are a new type of AI – a large language model or LLM algorithm. They enable users to ask a question, much as you would with a chatbot, and give what appears to be a comprehensive answer.

Early in 2023, after the release of ChatGPT, news outlets began to feature stories about university students using AI software to write their essays. Even at the University of Cambridge, an online poll by the uni’s independent student newspaper (Varsity) revealed that nearly 50% of students who responded had used the technology for university assignments.

However ChatGPT can give answers that are too simplistic, repetitive, and lacking the critical thinking expected of university students. Non-existent or inappropriate academic papers can be cited – one student was caught after their essay on leadership referenced a wizarding leadership book. It can also perpetuate bias. As one commentator said, the answers can be like cybernetic mansplaining.

Universities have said that the improper use of AI would be considered as academic misconduct, and that students must be the authors of their own work. Already, Turnitin – a company known for its plagiarism detection software – has launched an AI writing detector.

So if you use ChatGPT to write an essay, you may well be caught.

On the other hand, there may be some areas of university study where generative AI could be appropriate, and many unis are still weighing this up. Meantime, unless your uni has produced a policy on the acceptable use of ChatGPT and related AI, avoid using it for your assignments.

If you're caught cheating, you may fail the assignment, an entire module or even the whole degree. Failing a year or being expelled due to cheating is a costly mistake to make.

If you’ve used an essay mill, you may also have paid hundreds or thousands of pounds for it to produce a single piece of work. Essay mills are deceitful companies that lie and take advantage of students. You only encourage what they do by using them.

By cheating, you're missing out on the opportunity to push yourself and find out what you're capable of. You won’t be developing the analytical skills that could be vital for your future career in a fast-changing world. And, if you cheat and aren't caught, you're lessening the achievements of your fellow students who have worked hard and honestly.

Even UCAS have a system in place to ensure you're not lying on your university application. They have their own Verification Team whose job is to detect fraudulent information, particularly within personal statements.

There is no need to lie or cheat. If you're struggling, talk to someone. Universities have services to help students who are struggling with their workload. If you have extenuating circumstances you can apply to extend submission deadlines. 

Read university profiles to see what support services are available to students.

Cheating is not always deliberate, as students can unknowingly submit work that plagiarises the work of others. Unfortunately, claiming plagiarism in a university essay was unintentional does not protect you from being penalised for it.

There are ways you can avoid it:

• Read your university’s guidelines on plagiarism – especially if you're unsure whether your work could be penalised
• Reference as you write – each time you use someone else’s work you should make a note of who wrote or said it and where you found it. This way, when you come to fully referencing your essay it'll be much easier, and you’ll be less likely to plagiarise
• Consult a style guide – the style of referencing varies across subjects and individual lecturers will have their own preferences. Establish which one you need to use and have the style guide easily accessible while you’re referencing. This will make the whole process much quicker and make you less likely to leave out a reference by mistake
• Universities use plagiarism detectors – software that checks essays for plagiarism. If your marker suspects plagiarism, they're very likely to find it
• Talk to your lecturer – they don’t want to penalise you for plagiarism, so they should be more than happy to ensure your work is not breaking any rules

Cheating and plagiarism, either deliberate or accidental, are both avoidable. With good time management, hard work and using the resources available to you, you should never find yourself in a situation where you feel the need to break the rules.

If you do feel overwhelmed, resist taking the easy way out. Use your experience as a lesson and try not to get into the same situation again.

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What is plagiarism.

Plagiarism is usually defined as a discrete offense, a specific failure to give credit to a particular source. But it actually raises a much more fundamental question for writers: “Where is my voice in this project?” Seen in this light, the strategies that help you avoid plagiarism can also be strategies that help you gain power as a writer. Once your guiding question about your relationship to sources is “Where is my voice?” you are well on your way to using sources in an effective and legitimate way.

Plagiarism is the use of another’s work, words, or ideas without attribution. The word “plagiarism” comes from the Latin word for “kidnapper” and is considered a form of theft, a breach of honesty in the academic community. Plagiarizers suffer serious consequences in Yale College—including suspension or expulsion from school. (See the Yale College Undergraduate Regulations for more information.)

But beyond the risk of penalties, there are urgent moral and intellectual reasons to avoid plagiarism. When you write for an academic audience, you’re joining an ongoing conversation. When you plagiarize, you join that conversation on false grounds, representing yourself as someone you are not. What is more, the act of stealing another’s words or ideas erases your voice. It may be difficult to think of yourself as making an original contribution in the context of a class taught by an expert. But every assignment is an invitation to add something new to the conversation sparked by the course. You cannot make an original contribution if you are not the owner of the words and ideas that you present.

Plagiarism takes many forms, but it falls into three main categories: using a source’s language without quoting, using information from a source without attribution, and paraphrasing a source in a form that stays too close to the original. There are variations on these categories that you may not be familiar with, so see the Warning section for a fuller discussion of the rules and see the Fair Paraphrase section for a discussion of how to use a source’s idea in your own argument.

You must always make clear in your written work where you have borrowed from others—whether data, opinions, questions, ideas, or specific language. This obligation holds whether the sources are published or unpublished and whether they are in print or on the Internet. When in doubt, be sure to check with your instructor about how to acknowledge sources in your papers, especially since every academic discipline has its own conventions.

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Harvard Guide to Using Sources 

• The Honor Code
• Why Does it Matter if You Plagiarize?

Scholars place a premium on careful, original thought. Academic writing is essentially an ongoing conversation among scholars. As a college student, you are part of the community of scholars who are working to answer genuine questions in their fields by building on the knowledge and ideas that others have contributed. When you use sources to write a paper, you have the responsibility to represent others' ideas accurately and to contribute your own ideas to the discussion. Your professors expect you to do your own thinking, and they assign research and writing so that you can figure out what you think rather than reporting or parroting someone else's thoughts. You actually don't learn anything when you take your ideas from someone else; you learn by analyzing the ideas you have read about and developing your own responses to them.

At Harvard, the commitment to creating knowledge and contributing to a community that values learning and creation is expressed in the Honor Code, which makes explicit the value of both doing your own thinking and building on the knowledge created by others.

The Harvard College Honor Code

Members of the Harvard College community commit themselves to producing academic work of integrity – that is, work that adheres to the scholarly and intellectual standards of accurate attribution of sources, appropriate collection and use of data, and transparent acknowledgement of the contribution of others to their ideas, discoveries, interpretations, and conclusions. Cheating on exams or problem sets, plagiarizing or misrepresenting the ideas or language of someone else as one’s own, falsifying data, or any other instance of academic dishonesty violates the standards of our community, as well as the standards of the wider world of learning and affairs.

You can read more about the  Honor Code here .

When you conduct research for your own paper, you rely on the citations provided by other authors to find material relevant to your topic or question. Similarly, when you write an essay, you are responsible for providing a roadmap for your readers back to your source material so that they, too, can follow the conversation. By citing your sources you provide guidance to the scholars who come after you. In this way, anyone who wants to enter the conversation, to take a position different from yours, or to build on knowledge or ideas in your paper can do so.

So, for example, if you're asked to write a literature review for a psychology paper, part of your task is to provide clear information for your readers about where you found the literature you're reviewing. Similarly, if your Expos assignment asks you to read and critique Stanley Milgram's report of his famous obedience experiments and you come up with an argument that is informed by C.D. Herrera's (2001) claim that the deception in the experiments did not cause the subjects to suffer, then you must cite Herrera's article in your paper (Herrera, C.D. (2001) Ethics, deception, and 'those Milgram experiments.' Journal of Applied Philosophy , 18(3), 245-256.) and explain how his argument influenced your own thinking.

• What Constitutes Plagiarism?
• The Exception: Common Knowledge
• Other Scenarios to Avoid
• How to Avoid Plagiarism
• Harvard University Plagiarism Policy

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• Avoiding Plagiarism
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