What Is Cheating and Plagiarism?
Some students don’t even realize their actions may constitute cheating or plagiarism. Worse, some students have never stopped to think about how much easier the Internet has made it for professors to CATCH people plagiarizing. The official UCSB definition is as follows: “Cheating is the unauthorized use of information or study guides in any academic exercise.” One of the most common forms of cheating on campus is plagiarism, such as: • Borrowing a friend’s or roommate’s work, altering it and then submitting it as your own. • Borrowing a stranger’s work from an instructor’s mailbox, altering it and then submitting it as your own. (This can be especially hazardous to your health, as you will not only be charged with cheating, but also with theft!) • Buying a term paper from a “paper mill” (usually advertised in the back of magazines or on the Web). • Copying from a textbook or the Internet without attributing the source of the material (such as taking a paragraph from your textbook, chan
