Today, universities are taking plagiarism very seriously, using someone else’s words or ideas without giving adequate credit to the author of the original, and they are fighting against it. In the best of cases, teachers may decide to give a grade of “zero” to an assignment or a course; in the worst case, universities can suspend the entire degree or expel the student. This article has been written specifically for those students who have been accused of plagiarism, but who believe they are not guilty. The article offers some advice to these students on how to defend their position. At the same time, it should be noted that the article is provided for informational purposes only, as we do not provide legal advice. If you are seeking legal assistance, you should contact your attorney, who would be in a better position to assist you.

There is no doubt that plagiarism is a bad practice that not only jeopardizes your own academic standing, but also hampers the process of scientific discovery. In some cases, plagiarism can even lead to legal proceedings if the authors decide that their work is being misused. However, in the academic context, plagiarism is generally not considered a legal offense, but rather completely unethical conduct. For this reason, we have prepared a series of recommendations for you to consider in case you face accusations of plagiarism.

First of all, you should NEVER ADMIT intentional plagiarism, as that would be suicidal. If you admit it, your university or college will be able to do whatever it wants, including failing your degree. Generally, there can be two results of the plagiarism detection process. In half of the cases, your University WILL KNOW and later be able to DEMONSTRATE that you have committed plagiarism. In the other 50% of cases, colleges may SUSPECT that you have plagiarized, but could not prove it unless you voluntarily admit to having plagiarized.

As a general rule, universities can suspect plagiarism based on the following:

a) The language and writing style you used in the suspect article differs from what you normally use. This is especially applicable to foreign students for whom English is not the first language. Discrepancies can usually be easily spotted by teachers, as the text seems too perfect and “polished” and rich in scholarly jargon and specialized phraseology. If this is the case, your defense strategy may be to say that you asked a native speaker to review your work before submitting it to make it more professional and easy to read. This is absolutely legal, especially considering the fact that many universities would penalize mistakes in the English language. Some even try to say, when surprised, that the friend who edited the document amended the work and included some ideas without referring to them. However, this is an unstable strategy, so you need to be careful when using it.

b) The use of models or resources, which were not taught by your tutor or are not available in your library. In this case, your defense strategy might be to say that you did some additional reading or research and / or that you have a friend who is studying at a different university and who graciously gave you materials, books, or articles that would otherwise be inaccessible. However, you should always keep in mind that, should the need arise, your tutor or academic committee will surely ask you questions about the resources you used to write your work. Therefore, you must ensure that you can answer these questions by preparing meticulously for meetings. At the very least, you should know all the titles used and the authors and what each author said.

However, if it happens that your University can demonstrate that you have plagiarized, there could be several defense strategies, such as:

1) In the process of work, you had multiple drafts of the document, and as a result, you accidentally submitted a wrong version of the report. You can state that while the drafts were not referenced correctly, as they were only written to help you plan the document and give you general guidance, the final version was referenced and prepared in strict accordance with academic requirements. After all, you are a human being and you have the right to be wrong.

2) Your computer had crashed and because of that all the information in the file where you kept all your drafts and excerpts from various resources was converted to plain text, which prevented you from being able to differentiate between the bits written by you and the ones copied. from other sources. For this reason, he was greatly confused, and given the urgency of the situation, he may have misused the information contained in the corrupted file.

3) You just forgot to put “quotes”. This can happen if you paraphrased the ideas of other authors but forgot to provide the references. In this regard, you should always remember that not only the direct quote but also the reference without giving credit constitutes plagiarism. Similarly, you could say that you had written the text for your own purposes, outside of the academic curriculum, a few years ago and then decided to use the material for homework, sincerely believing that those were your own words, as the pre-written ones. The text, created for your own needs, did not contain references.

4) If it is only one or two sentences, you can affirm that, having read a lot of information on the subject, you internalized certain ideas and began to agree with them to the extent that they became yours. Therefore, in writing his article, he made use of the ideas sincerely believing that he was expressing his own thoughts on the subject. Once again, you are just a human being and everyone has the right to be wrong. As a variation, you could even say that you have a photographic memory and that some ideas just “stuck” to you, so you inadvertently used them as your own. However, keep in mind that the commission may want to put your unique skills to the test.

5) It may happen that a University has not adequately informed students about what constitutes plagiarism and how to avoid it. Even if oral instructions can be given, they may not be enough, as students overwhelmed by a huge amount of information can easily forget them. As a general rule, colleges often distribute plagiarism guidelines in writing. However, due to organizational inefficiencies, this may not happen. If this were the case, you could plead your innocence due to ignorance, that is, not having been informed in due time about the concept and forms of plagiarism and its possible consequences. However, you should always double check if the materials have not actually been distributed before resorting to this strategy.

6) If you are accused of submitting an article obtained from a test bank, a service that provides prewritten articles to students, your best defense would be to admit the fact, but claim that you wrote the article yourself and then sold or donated it. . to the test bench. In other words, you weren’t using anyone’s ideas other than your own, as the document on the test bed is your creation. In most cases, it would be problematic for universities to disprove that as they would have to know the exact date the course work was sold to the test bed, which would require the cooperation and goodwill of the companies. The latter, however, are usually quite cautious in these matters.

Sometimes you may also realize that you have plagiarized, even before you receive your tutor’s comments. In that case, it would be wise to approach your tutor immediately and tell them that you submitted an incorrect copy of the work. Try to contact him by email so that you have some material evidence in case you may need it to support your position. Finally, you should always remember that whatever you do, you must remain calm, collected, and composed when meeting with the tutor or committee. Be confident, determined but always courteous, as arrogant behavior will only do you a disservice.