5. Plagiarism and Referencing (who, where, why, what, when, how) How I would enlighten a new college student.

Plagiarism is using the ideas or words of another writer as if they were your own, without any form of acknowledgment. This is more than just another form of cheating. It is literary theft. It is stealing someone else's work. 

A reference is a sign, an acknowledgement of indebtedness. In the academic world it’s considered good manners, a sort of scholarly politeness.

As a new student in a new institute or university your lecturers will talk you through how to reference and to avoid plagiarism.  You might be a new student in a particular college having come from a different college, referencing differs from all colleges.  Every college have their own way of referencing, you have to pay attention to the rules of referencing in your current college and forget about your previous college. 

 Till now I cannot reference without checking the reference list I got from the college.  As a student, part of your college education involves learning how to evaluate information thoughtfully in order to use it to create your own work. When you use information from articles, books and electronic sources for essays and reports, you are expected to write down where you got the ideas from. All your college assignments submitted for an academic qualification must be referenced, fully and accurately. Taking information and using it without referencing your work will be graded zero and so is paste and coping. 

 

Here in Itb we use the Harvard System of Referencing.  This referencing is based on two main elements

• A short citation in the text of the assignment

• A full reference in the list of sources at the end of the assignment

In your citation if you were referencing a book you will only write down the author’s last name and the initials, year of publication and the page number.  The book title, place and the publishers comes on the reference list.


 

 

 

 

Reference

http://learnline.cdu.edu.au/researchingskills/workshop3/plagiarism.html assessed 30/11/2012.

http://studentzone.roehampton.ac.uk/howtostudy/plagiarism/whatisreferencing/index.htmlassessed 01/12/2012.