Watch: Understand Why Plagiarism Happens

Dr. Steve Rawle (Lecturer in Film and TV Production)
Well, plagiarism is really academic theft. It is the knowing -- or more commonly, unknowing -- passing off of somebody else's ideas, research, or opinions as your own.

Andy Law (BA Film and TV Production)
Plagiarism is where you use anyone else's work without kind of referencing it and without acknowledging that you've used someone else's work, and kind of passing it off as your own.

Sarah Crabbe (Head of Programme, MA Leading Innovation and Change)
Using someone else's ideas and passing them off as your own. So that might be writing a sentence that you've read from a book, or it might be cutting and pasting something for a website and not referencing either of those things.

Rawle
Well, plagiarism can come in many forms. Certainly over the past decade or so, we've had a shift from the old style of typing up a book or writing out a book to just cutting and pasting off websites. Now, this is the most common form of plagiarism we find, certainly: wholesale plagiarism. There'll be a tendency to pull paragraphs out, integrate them a little bit, move some words around, and pass that off as the work of the student.
Sometimes it's just smaller instances, where a couple of lines will drop in, or it'll be a quote that's not attributed, or references that are missing, paraphrasing, or the knowledge simply from having taught a module that those ideas don't belong to the student. The student has not attributed them.

Andy Buckton (Senior Lecturer in Sports)
I think a lot of the time, students don't realize that they're plagiarizing because of potentially poor time management versus the processes of developing effective written work. And it can be just through poor scholarship.

Sylwia Ziminska (BA Counselling Studies)
I think that the main reasons to plagiarize is because for some of us, I guess, the amount of work which you get in comparison to your college work or you know, sixth form work or wherever you come from can be slightly overwhelming. So then if you leave your assignments to last night, you just get so stressed. And you just don't know what to do, and you feel like you can't do it. So I guess the easiest way is to hope for the best and then copy something off the internet.

Rawle
Well, students can commit plagiarism in a number of ways. Firstly is to make sure that they reference properly. We are all very big on teaching, trying to teach a scholarly technique that means every idea, every concept, every quotation is cited with the surname of the author and the date of publication and for a quotation a page number, so that it's very clear that that is the source of that idea. And students can block off any perceived or potential plagiarism by very clearly citing.

Celine Kingman (Lecturer in Film and TV Production)
One important way that students can avoid plagiarizing is through good time management, having a good essay plan. Ultimately, the best piece of advice I can give you is that if you have any doubts about whether you should reference or not, it probably means you should reference.

Ziminska
Our library website, for example,, which I was using a lot in the first year, has a whole section about referencing. You know, it says how to reference articles, how to reference books, how to reference websites, and guides you steps by step.

Crabbe
But as a final check, it's a really good idea to put their essays through TurnItIn, and that will pick up any of the places where they've accidentally forgotten to reference the words.