From the Syllabus:

Plagiarism (Source: SBVC Handbook)
- Students have often been rewarded for copying and pasting something from the internet into their own papers without proper citation. But this practice is plagiarism. And plagiarism is a violation of the academic honesty and intellectual integrity policies of SBVC.

What is Plagiarism? (Source: Ebscohost)

It is important to understand the exact definition of plagiarism, why it is so important to teachers, and how to avoid it. Plagiarism, broadly defined, encompasses presenting other people’s ideas as your own without clearly giving them credit. You must give credit to your source in the following examples:

Any part of a text you directly quote in your paper. You need to put any and every word that belongs to someone else that you copied from their text in quotation marks (with the exception of words like ‘and’ or ‘the’).

Any part of a text you paraphrase.

Any part of a text you summarize.

Any person’s original thoughts, opinions, or ideas.

Any facts, statistics, graphs or information that is not ‘common knowledge.’

Note: Plagiarism has always been a problem, but recently it has become an epidemic. As such, many schools subscribe to ‘plagiarism finders.’ These pay-for-services allow a teacher to input a portion of your paper to be scanned against a wealth of information. This service will alert the teacher if your information was improperly cited.

Paraphrasing

One of the most often misused elements of writing a research paper is in the improper presentation of paraphrased material. To paraphrase is to completely recast the content of a source in your own words, keeping the same tone and general length of the original. Even when you paraphrase, you must include a citation.

Unicheck Plagiarism Checker in Canvas

SBVC uses Unicheck to check your submitted work for similarity and originality, which are indicators of possible plagiarism.

For my class, I will pay special attention to your submission if you score a Similarity score of 20% or higher or an Originality score of 80% or lower.

To clarify, those scores mean the same thing. They correspond to each other.

For more information on Unicheck, watch this short video on how it works:

https://youtu.be/_ut0Z2IyWSU