chelzmalee said:
Okay so my school told me that plagarism is when you take the work of another without acknowledgement. But, then they wrote that this includes using wording, ideas, phrases etc etc etc.
So basically alot of research etc is plagarised.. yes?
Can someone explain the logic here?
Its stealing if you don't acknowledge the source.
You will find when you go to university when you do assignments, you won't actually be conducting any research of your own (as in studies etc), all you will be doing is researching the research that has already been conducted by academics who have done their PhD.
This is not to say that you won't have your own ideas, because you will. But at university you will be required to back YOUR IDEAS up with evidence from other sources and therefore quite a large portion of your assignment will be ideas from other people (from textbooks, journal articles etc) which you will need to reference.
At university a REFERENCE LIST and BIBLIOGRAPHY are two different things. A Reference list is 100% compulsary and if you do not include one you can expect ZERO (because its evidence that you did not study at all and/or are using someone elses work without acknowledgement). A reference list is a list of books, articles, websites etc which have been used in your essay (or report). A bibliography is a list of books, articles, websites which you did not use specifically in your assignment, but you want to acknowledge the source anyway (and its a good idea because you may have included some of the ideas by mistake in your assignment without knowing).
Here is an example of how its done at university:
>>
This is an example paragraph of an idea I found which I have put in my own words (Curtain et. al. 1996).
This is an example of a "direct quote from a source and not my own words" (Astley 1998).
>>
Those two above sentences (with intext referencing) would then be linked to your reference page like this:
Curtain et. al. 1996, 'Macroeconomics in a Global Society', Australian Economics Journal, vol.25, issue.4 pp.128-130, Sydney Australia.
(I wont do the other reference)
Im not sure on if I am exactly correct about the reference list method in my example (as I have not done it for over two years).
Yes I am doing the HSC but I have done a full fee paying university course (subject not the entire degree) before so this is why I know ;-)
Oh and when you go to university, don't be afraid to use even 200 references in your assessment items. The more the better. The lecturer does not want to know if you have created a BRAND NEW IDEA as an undergraduate, they want to know that you have LEARNT the stuff, and you demonstrate this by using lots of references to back your IDEA up, because you're not doing a 3 year study on a particular subject, thats what the PhD students are for.
You will GAIN marks for using more references than someone who uses hardly any. This is a mistake lots of new undergraduate students make when they first go to university. They think the lecturer expects them to know the stuff. The opposite is true; the lecturer expects you to attend lectures, to attend tutorials and spend as much time in the library and online (researching the assignment question and subject ideas) as possible.
