HOW MUCH PLAGIARISM IS ALLOWED – IN ASSIGNMENT OR RESEARCH WORK 

HOW MUCH PLAGIARISM IS ALLOWED – IN ASSIGNMENT OR RESEARCH WORK 

Typically, students are curious about the maximum allowable rate of plagiarism. Regarding the acceptable level of plagiarism in a manuscript, neither a consensus nor clear-cut standards exist.

Depending on the institution, a certain minimum amount of originality is expected in written assignments. In some cases, students can have no more than 15% of the content in common. At the same time, some forbid any form of plagiarism, even if there are only 20% similarities; it will be considered plagiarism if the matching text is a long passage of copied material.

However, there should not be major ethical concerns raised when using standard terminology and method-related elements. Before we move on to discuss how much plagiarism is allowed, we will briefly discuss what plagiarism is.

Simply put, by appropriating another person’s words or ideas and passing them off as your own, you commit plagiarism. Plagiarism is the act of claiming someone’s work and ideas as your own, although there are various forms of plagiarism. It all boils down to attributing yourself as the author of someone else’s thoughts, ideas, or work. Therefore, one could say that it constitutes cheating.

Plagiarism occurs when one uses the work of another without giving proper credit. However, by correctly citing your sources, you can avoid plagiarising your work in almost all circumstances. Most instances of plagiarism can be avoided by simply citing the source of the borrowed material and providing a link to it in the work.

Academic writing, in fact, any writing at all, often involves the use of a plagiarism checker. Plagiarism checkers help professors determine whether or not a student has plagiarised material in a written assignment. They are made in such a way that a quick report with flawless results can be generated by comparing the paper to the billions of resources available on the Internet. This facilitates quick and accurate grading for educators during an assessment.

As a result of an advanced plagiarism detector supported by AI technology, educators can rest assured that scanned content has not been tampered with. It performs a thorough search to find instances of duplicate, nearly identical, or otherwise relevant sentences or text; this way, educators can help students grow by focusing on issues like content, grammar, writing style, and organisation.

While some teachers may tell their students that no plagiarism is acceptable, the consensus among universities is that no more than 15 per cent is acceptable. But since the software is used throughout the industry, there is a lot of room for interpretation, especially among institutions that span national boundaries like Scottish and English universities.

Similar logic underlies most software scoring systems; submissions are flagged for possible plagiarism if more than 15 per cent of the document is found to be copied from another source.

This is a good rule of thumb to follow because it is in line with standard academic practice in the field and makes an effective strategic allowance for any errors in the software, which, if not allowed, could have several unfair ramifications for the student’s submission, including the deduction of points and/or the destruction of the submission.

If a student submits an essay, report, or thesis with a plagiarism rate of more than 20%, that should be taken as a red flag that the student has intentionally plagiarised the work in an attempt to fool their professor or examiner. The 15% figure is interpreted as unintentional plagiarism in academic institutions, with a small percentage added to account for software errors that may occur in such complex and nuanced systems.

Consequently, if a student’s work has a plagiarism score of over 15%, the work likely contains significant amounts of plagiarised material; even an increase of 1% can make the difference between academic integrity and plagiarism. When a student’s plagiarism rate is over 20%, it is taken as a red flag that they are trying to cheat the system and fool their professor or teacher into giving them a passing grade.

As with theses and dissertations, plagiarised content in a published journal can be subject to legal repercussions, so a score of more than 5% is unacceptable. There should be no plagiarism in theses and dissertations, but a level of 5% is generally accepted as acceptable.

Your professor or lecturer might overlook the occasional sentence you write that sounds too similar to one they’ve already read, but if it happens too often, you could get in trouble. Blogging and other writing are more casual forms of writing, so a score of 30% or lower is usually considered adequate.

It’s easy to get caught plagiarising in academic writing (or any writing), whether or not you had dishonest intentions. When working on lengthy assignments, students often lose track of their work, as well as the sources of any paraphrased or quoted material. It’s best not to risk being accused of plagiarism, which could lead to embarrassment and (more worryingly) penalties or even the loss of your college place, so make sure to properly cite other people’s work as you go along.

The consequences of being caught plagiarising are severe. The immediate consequence of being caught plagiarising is that the student is seen as lazy and unreliable. These traits not only interfere with their current academic performance but may also affect their future ability to land a well-paying job.

There is little incentive for a company to hire someone who has already demonstrated their inability to be productive and honest before they have even worked a shift for the company. It is not an exaggeration to say this regularly occurs, especially given the importance of academic referees in landing a good job after graduation.

Conclusion 

Today’s students should focus on becoming well-versed in the use of digital resources. Students must develop information literacy skills to avoid academic dishonesty. The ability to use primary and secondary sources to build analytical reasoning about a topic is another way of defining information literacy.

Students who invest time and effort into improving their information literacy are more likely to finish the year with a better grade point average.