Cheat! How to avoid claims of plagiarism in coursework
For Creative iMedia, there is a lot of coursework for you to complete. Some of the written work can be a bit of a drag and often students get tempted to simply copy text from a website and paste it into their work.
Unfortunately this is not allowed and is referred to as plagiarism. If you are found to have copied work from the internet, a text book or from your friend, an investigation could be launched by the exam board, leaving you with a 0 mark for your coursework.
This is really serious stuff.
The issue for Creative iMedia is that a lot of what you need to put down in your coursework is very specific (technical) and can only be worded a certain number of ways. This is why you need to be very careful and I would suggest following this rule of thumb:
Can I write it in my own words so that it makes sense and is not close to the source material?
If you can write it in your own words so that it is not close to the source material you should do this. However, again be careful. Writing in your own words does not mean re-arranging the words or replacing 1 word in a sentence for example:
Source material – Lossless compression involves using algorithms to remove repeated content.
Lossless compression involves using algorithms to take out repeated contentThis is far too close to the original content.
Images can use lossless compression to reduce the size of the file while retaining the same quality. It does this by using clever algorithms such as an algorithm that will store repeated content in a less memory intensive way.
This is great – the original point has been expanded upon and it has been written in the students own words and gets the point across clearly.
A robots work is not your own
Something else that has been seen more recently and is still classed as plagiarism, is copying and pasting work and putting it into an ai (artificial intelligence) powered website that re-arranges the words and replaces some words with others.
If you copied the work from the website, the work that the ai produces is not your own. Therefore, it is still classed as plagiarism. However, these types of websites might be useful to you if used correctly.
There is nothing wrong with putting a sentence or 2 into a website such as this to see how it re-arranges the sentence and this may give you some ideas about how you might construct your sentence or some other words that you can use when writing. As long as you do not copy the work and only use it for ideas this is fine.
Referencing
Sometimes a textbook or a website says something so perfectly that it would be silly to try and write it any other way. This is where you can copy and paste but, you need to reference where the work has come from and you need to do it in the correct way.
For example to quote from this website you would:
- Put the quote in quotation marks ‘This is the quote’
- Put the website address in brackets either before or after the quote and the date you accessed the site EG
- ‘This is the quote’ (www.studyimedia.co.uk/blog, accessed 10/9/2021)
- If it is written by an author you should also put this in your reference as well
I’m not going to going to go into referencing here in any great detail because OCR have produced an excellent guide that is certainly worth looking at and following – https://www.ocr.org.uk/Images/168840-the-ocr-guide-to-referencing.pdf
Recap
To save yourself (and your teacher!) lots of headaches, never, no matter how tempted you may be, copy and paste from a website or copy from any other source. You run the risk of your coursework being 0 graded and there may be further consequences for you as well. It’s not worth it. Do it right first time, referencing is a great skill to learn and will come in useful in both sixth form and university.
