Written by Cassie, 2021 Cohort
As a student who graduated from the UK education system, I am very familiar with academic citation standards. In my opinion, the UK and Canada have very similar treatment of plagiarism. I would like to share my feelings and experiences about academic integrity at university.
Consequences
The UK, like Canada, has zero tolerance for academic plagiarism. Therefore, the school has very strict rules about the consequences of plagiarism. During my university, there was a department that was dedicated to supervising the academic performance of students. Specifically, if plagiarism or cheating was found, they will punish the person according to the rules. If the cases are minor, credits will be deducted, and the serious ones will be expelled without mercy. In the first semester, we had a class which is about how to have a standard citation in our papers in order to prevent plagiarism. In addition, each homework requirement document has a “Cheating and Plagiarism” statement, which states the basic principles of plagiarism to remind students to maintain academic integrity at all times. This shows how important academic integrity is!
Self-plagiarism
Are you also of the opinion that as long as this is what you wrote by yourself, we do not need to cite it in the paper? I had the same idea many years ago until I knew this term- self-plagiarism. In the British system, the duplicate check rate needs to be verified in all assignment papers. As long as your paper is found to be ineligible, the course will be failed.
This duplication-checking system is called “Turnitin”. In short, your articles will be uploaded on this system, and then it will detect which content is misquoted. This means that if you upload your article for the first time, the article without citing your own literature will be identified as plagiarism on the second re-upload. However, for some students who are new to academic citation and Turnitin, it is understandable that “self-plagiarism” may occur. In this situation, if we notify the teacher in advance, the original article will be deleted in the background, and we will just need to upload it again. Therefore, the teacher often emphasized that we cannot reuse previous homework. For example, if an assignment is assigned to a topic we have already written about, we cannot submit the same paper, even for a completely different course.
No matter what education system the country has, academic integrity is one of the personal qualities that schools place extreme importance on. Not only do we need to follow strict citation norms and focus on critical thinking, but more importantly, we need to be honest and trustworthy. No matter what stage of education a student is at, academic integrity needs to be taken seriously.
Bibliography
https://www.lib.sfu.ca/help/academic-integrity/plagiarism
https://libanswers.bcu.ac.uk/faq/174112
https://icity.bcu.ac.uk/celt/Learning-Technology-Support/Turnitin/Index