Plagiarism is "to steal and pass off the ideas or words of another as one's own".
When I first came to college I had never even heard of plagiarism. I found the whole concept very daunting. It was all explained to us then and it seemed very simple. Then when we got our first essay I had finished and was chatting to my friends and realised I had plagiarised most of it. Thank god I hadn't handed it up yet. I had taken stuff from books and websites and just changed the words around and thought that was ok as I hadn't taken it directly. I felt like such an idiot.
At then end of each piece of work that you write you have to do a reference list. This just means that you have to give credit or a reference if you take someone else's idea, opinion or theory. Even facts or statistics, graphs, drawings etc stuff that is not common knowledge all need a reference as it is not your own work. Even if you put something in your own words it needs a reference. This is known as paraphrasing. This is the part I found the hardest as I felt like I was paraphrasing the whole thing and nothing was my own.
We found out that there is a system our lecturers use called 'Turn it in' that detects plagiarism when an essay is uploaded. I think we were all nervous about this at first in case we plagiarised by accident. So what ever you do don't plagiarise or you will be caught.
