LibGuides: Preventing Plagiarism and Academic Dishonesty Tutorial: What Is Plagiarism?

What Is Plagiarism?

The Student Code for Midlands Technical College states:

'Plagiarism' is defined as the appropriation of any other person’s work and the unacknowledged incorporation of that work in one’s own work. -MTC Student Handbook, Appendix I - Student Code for MTC

According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, to "plagiarize" means:

to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own
to use (another's production) without crediting the source
to commit literary theft
to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source

Plagiarism may be:

Deliberate or blatant (intentionally presenting someone else’s work as your own)
Accidental (wrongly or unsatisfactorily citing ideas and words from a source)

It may not be possible for your professor to establish whether plagiarized work was deliberate or accidental. In either case, you and your professor are placed in a difficult situation.

(Scribbr, 2020)