Plagiarism awareness course

Plagiarism is the act of presenting work created by someone or something else — including content generated by an AI tool — as your own. It is considered a serious academic offence and is dealt with in accordance with the university policies on Examinations and Assessments including specific reference to plagiarism and its relationship to Examinations and academic integrity. Plagiarism is also addressed in the Honesty and Integrity area of the Student Code of Conduct.

All students must familiarise themselves with the Plagiarism Awareness guidance from the Library. In addition, you are required to complete the online Plagiarism Awareness course: Plagiarism Online Course for Master’s Students. Completion of this course is mandatory. If you have taken it previously, we strongly recommend that you revisit the material and refresh your understanding before starting your IRP. This course covers essential principles of citation, referencing, and academic honesty.

Plagiarism rules apply to all forms of content, not just text. This includes figures, tables, diagrams, code, data visualizations, and any other material that originates from external sources. All such content must be properly attributed and, where appropriate, permission obtained for reuse.

Even when properly quoted and cited, copying larger sections of text from other sources constitutes poor academic practice. Your written reports should predominantly consist of your own words, demonstrating your understanding and analysis. Direct quotations should be used sparingly and strategically - primarily when it is essential to preserve the exact formulation of someone else’s idea or when the specific wording carries particular significance to your argument. Full sentences, especially multiple sentences, are almost never in quotes. Instead, you should aim to paraphrase and synthesize information from external sources, integrating it into your own narrative and analysis.

Plagiarism detection tools often produce unreliable similarity scores that should not be interpreted as definitive measures of plagiarism. They frequently flag common phrases and standard technical terminology, such as “convolutional neural network we designed was…” or “in this work, we explore the influence of…”, that represent conventional scholarly language rather than copied content. Additionally, similarity percentages are heavily influenced by document length, with shorter reports often showing artificially inflated scores. Generative AI detection tools are similarly unreliable, often producing false positives and negatives. Due to these limitations, we assess potential academic misconduct, such as plagiarism or violations of the generative AI ban, through a careful review rather than relying on automated detection scores. Students do not have direct access to Turnitin or other plagiarism detection tools; when necessary, we submit written reports for checking.

Since the project plan is part of the same assignment as your final report, you can re-use text from your project plan as long as it is your intellectual property, without worrying about self-plagiarism.