There are different types of plagiarism and all are serious violations of academic honesty.
Plagiarism in academic context can be classified as major or minor.
a) Major
Major plagiarism also referred to as level 3 plagiarism or serious plagiarism
offences occur when a significant fraction of the entire work was written by
someone else. For example:
- Direct duplication of works of another, including copying material, ideas or
concepts from somewhere else whether published or unpublished
- Presenting someone else’s assignment as your own for assessment
- Claiming individual ownership of work done by a group
- Selling/buying term papers
- Submitting custom written papers
- Using fictitious citations in a work
- A supervisor publishing student’s work and claiming lead authorship.
b) Minor
Minor plagiarism also referred to as level 1 and 2 plagiarism, involves cases of small
quantities of work in which there has been no acknowledgement or there is inappropriate
acknowledgement. Examples include the following:
- Citation of a few sentence
- Paraphrasing someone else’s work and passing it as one’s own
- Using one’s name on someone else’s phrases
- Self-plagiarism (using one’s previous work)
- Failure to put in quotations mark, or providing incorrect information about source
- Inaccurate citation/ Incomplete citation
- Collusion (where a student has willingly provided assignment(s) to another
student) - Student(s) copying another’s work in an examination
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