Plagiarism

There's a little bit of a problem that happens and occurs in some assignments that we receive and within that, it is where people have just taken another person's own work and they have put it in an assignment and it has not been quoted or referenced to that other person. That is the definition of what plagiarism is, it means just taking someone else's work and claiming it for your own. Within any type of educational environment, we can, of course, use quotes and references, but then we would have to use the correct Harvard referencing system to state that it is somebody else's work and you are referencing it just to help enhance your information. Inside the qualifications that we are teaching, we have a want that is going to be the person's own words that are being used to answer the questions. When the question states it is your role and responsibility, if you are just listing out of a book, the roles and responses of a teacher, that is very generic.

And you may be teaching lots of different subjects or you may be teaching a very specific sector where some of these roles and responsibilities are not even relevant, so you have to make it where it is individualised towards yourself. Yes, of course, we can be generic, but we need to make sure that it is your own words that are being used, and we can use the I. I am, I am responsible for, I do this, I do that. Whereas when we are using other people's reference work is that you are stating that this person would do this, this person would do that, which then goes to show that it is not actually your work. So the general idea is, if you are not overly, 100% sure of the subject or the question that is being asked, yes, of course, do some research. Please do use the internet, please do look at books, journals, wherever it may require, but it is... The hardest part is people will cut and paste directly onto a document, and they will not even change some of the wording in there. And they do not even change when it actually says a quote about an experiment that has been completed today when we did complete an experiment. These are just examples of some of the things we say a blue line underlined means a link to another page or to another question.

We use a system to check for any plagiarism, so we can check all the words and word counts and it tells us exactly which website the information comes from or from a journal, documentation, wherever that may be. And in reading a question, it is quite easy for us when we are marking it that you can actually see that the depth of answer is more of a level higher than the Award in Education and Training might be, plus the books that are relevant to this course, we are aware of, and of course, we have actually been through the books ourselves so we know what they sound like as well. Now, just to sort of expel some problems around plagiarism, the written word has only a certain amount of words, so of course, there are going to be some times when we cannot avoid this, but if an assignment of 400 words is 50% plagiarised, that means at least 200 of those words are someone else's.

But in some cases, we may get a count of between, say, 4% and 10% of it is plagiarised, that that is not as bad as something being as big as 50% or even 40%, because some things cannot be written differently from what has already been written. Yeah, there's only a certain amount of ways that some things can be written or stated and so some of it will be plagiarised, but it is the rest of it around it, it is when you can actually look at something and see there is seven sentences here, there is someone else's full, complete work compared to there is a few, actually two or three words together which match up to something else's work. We would not say it is fully plagiarised, you are using your own words to make clear the point of reference or discussion.

So the biggest thing when doing our assignments is that, yes, you can research. Yes, you can quote as long as you have referenced, but if you use a quote or a reference, you must not include that in the word count. Now, the minimum word count on an Award in Education and Training Course, the AET, is 400 words per question. Now, I also get asked by learners, if it has got two parts, do I have to do 400 words per part? The answer is no, it is to the question itself. If it is in... If you have got columns and you may be answering a little piece of information in each column, that will be a decision made by us if it is adequate, sufficient and enough to cover the question. Yeah, the idea is if a question says to explain, it needs to be in-depth. So when you start going into depth, you can use examples, so this might be where you use a quote or a reference.

As long as after you have used the quote or reference at the end of the assignment, you have referenced it using the Harvard system. So that is basically quoting the person, the source of information, publication and the date. If you take things off the internet, generally there is another method you have to use, the internet site in brackets, the date, edition, whatever it might be and it is making sure you are sourcing this properly. We again, researching is nothing... There is nothing wrong with it, but using other people's information is a plagiarised information and it will be an instant referral. I can use examples of having people submitting three or four pieces of work and I would look at the first piece and there has been plagiarism, plagiarised information in there. Then I would actually, as soon as I look at the next work, I am going to do the search to look at it straight away. I will check for plagiarism, the first thing I do before I even look at it.

So the general idea is, if we are doing the AET course, you put one assignment in first, have it marked, get some feedback and if there is any plagiarism in there that will be, again, expressed. But ideally, we want to nip this now and say, "Please do not plagiarise information, you can quote and reference, but it will not be counted into the word count, and we need to do this from the very first assignment".