Print this chapterPrint this chapter

STA Student Handbook (Taught Programmes) 2025/26

PLAGIARISM

Queen Mary defines plagiarism as: “Presenting someone else’s work as your own, irrespective of intention. Close paraphrasing, copying from the work of another person, including another student, using the ideas of another person without proper acknowledgement or repeating work you have previously submitted – at Queen Mary or at another institution - without properly referencing yourself (known as ‘self plagiarism’) also constitutes plagiarism.”  

Academic Integrity Module on QMplus: 

Queen Mary offers an online training course for all students, called Academic Integrity where all forms of plagiarism are explored and explained. All students are required to complete the course on QMplus. You will need to enrol yourself on the course, by clicking on 'enrol me'. 

Please see the Academic Integrity and Misconduct Policy.

 

Plagiarism is a serious offence, and all students suspected of plagiarism will be subject to an investigation. If found guilty, penalties can include failure of the module to suspension or permanent withdrawal from Queen Mary.  

It is your responsibility to ensure that you understand plagiarism and how to avoid it. The recommendations below can help you in avoiding plagiarism. 

  • Be sure to record your sources when taking notes, and to cite these if you use ideas or, especially, quotations from the original source. Be particularly careful if you are cutting and pasting information between two documents, and ensure that references are not lost in the process. 

  • Be sensible in referencing ideas – commonly held views that are generally accepted do not always require acknowledgment to particular sources. However, it is best to be safe to avoid plagiarism. 

  • Be particularly careful with quotations and paraphrasing.  

  • Be aware that technology, such as Turnitin, is now available at Queen Mary and elsewhere that can automatically detect plagiarism. 

  • Ensure that all works used are referenced appropriately in the text of your work and fully credited in your bibliography. 

  • If in doubt, ask for further guidance from your Advisor or module tutor. 

Students are expected to demonstrate academic integrity in their studies at all times. This involves observing standards of good critical practice: e.g., fulfilling assignment requirements, crediting the work of others when you use it in your own coursework, undertaking research ethically, and presenting your work according to the specified style.  

All students are subject to Queen Mary's Academic Integrity & Misconduct Policy.  Academic misconduct includes, but is not limited to:

    • Plagiarism; 
    • "Self-plagiarism," or the submission of work, or sections of work, for assessment in more than one module or assignment (including work previously submitted for assessment at another institution);
    • Examination offences;
    • The use, or attempted use, of ghost writing services for any part of assessment;
    • the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence tools, such as ChatGPT, unless explicitly permitted;
    • The fraudulent reporting of source material, experimental results, research, or other investigative work;
    • Collusion in the preparation or production of submitted work.

 

REFERENCING

Referencing conventions vary across the different academic disciplines. Make sure to follow the referencing style of your discipline.
 
The undergraduate and postgraduate modules in the following departments use Harvard as their academic referencing system for assessment and assignments: Film, the Language Centre, Linguistics, Modern Languages and Comparative Literature. (Linguistics modules may set an alternative system in some cases.)
 
The best place to find referencing rules and conventions is the Cite it Right module in the Library QMplus pages. Please also see the Find it! Use it! Reference it! module.

 

Using GEN AI in coursework

Students are permitted to use generative AI to research and improve an assignment, in the same way you might use Google to research, and Grammarly to improve writing. Some of your modules might include teaching events and exercises in which you can explore and discuss the responsible and constructive use of AI resources. We advise very strongly against using, as if your own words, any complete sentences from an AI app in your assignments. If you have used an AI-generated sentence, for some reason appropriate to the assignment, you should provide an appropriate reference and citation. 

Using generative AI apps (such as OpenAI’s GTP4 and Meta’s LLaMA) to write an assignment is academic misconduct, or cheating. Students who have been found, following investigation, to have committed academic misconduct can be penalised. The potential range of outcomes for allegations of misconduct that are upheld are listed in paragraph 87 and Appendix 2 of the Policy.

Work which is produced by generative AI can be rather obvious to markers, and there are IT solutions, such as Turnitin (see below) that can be used as well, both now and at any time in the future. 

 

Use of Turnitin in the School of the Arts

 

Turnitin is a web-based plagiarism prevention system used by most universities in the UK. This chapter describes how Turnitin is used within the School, and the data it creates about your work.

How Turnitin works

Assignment submission on QMplus will be set up to incorporate submission to Turnitin. Turnitin will analyse the submitted work to identify text matches with other sources and will compare the work against:

  • the current and archived web;
  • previously submitted work (this includes work by other students at QMUL or elsewhere);
  • books and journals.

For each piece of submitted work, Turnitin provides two things:

  • A similarity index, which indicates the percentage of the submitted paper that Turnitin has identified as matching other sources.
  • An originality report, which shows each of these matches in more detail, including the source(s) that Turnitin has found.

 

How Turnitin is used in the School of the Arts

Turnitin is used on the majority of foundation, undergraduate and postgraduate assignments that contribute towards your final grade. Turnitin will not normally be used on the following assignments:

  • short assignments which are not continuous text (e.g. MCQs, quizzes)
  • contributions to online discussions
  • exercises submitted on paper
  • exams
  • multi-media assignments

For those assignments where Turnitin is used, all submissions to that assignment will be submitted to Turnitin.

 

How we use the information provided by Turnitin

Only academic staff will make a judgement on whether plagiarism has occurred in a piece of work. An academic may interpret the originality report to help, but Turnitin itself does not make this judgement.

We do not use a threshold percentage to identify whether plagiarism has occurred. In other words, we will consider all Turnitin reports, not only those which reach a given percentage.  We may review any originality report in detail.

Turnitin will highlight matching text such as references, quotations, common phrases and data tables within work that has no plagiarism issues at all.  Those interpreting Turnitin reports will discount such matches, and so initial percentages are often irrelevant. (Templates such as the STA coversheets will automatically be picked up, for example, and will be discounted.)

Where it is suspected that plagiarism has occurred in a piece of work, the originality report may be submitted to one of the School's Academic Misconduct Officers for further investigation.

 

How you can use the information provided by Turnitin

There will be an opportunity for you to see a Turnitin report on your work before Turnitin is used on your assessed work. You should view this as an opportunity to use the report to help you identify any potential issues you may not have spotted before, and not to change individual words to avoid a match. In order to take advantage of that opportunity, however, you will need to submit your work well in advance of the deadline to ensure that you are able to review the report and, if necessary, amend and resubmit your work by the deadline. You should be aware that it can take up to 24 hours to receive each report.

No other student will be able to see an originality report on your work.

To help you understand what the report is telling you, please ensure you have followed the guidance on the Technology Enhanced Learning Team's guidance (Interpreting the Turnitin originality report). You should also refer to the sections Writing Essays, and Referencing and Plagiarism under COURSEWORK, ASSESSMENTS, PROGRESSION, MARKING in this Handbook.

If you have a question about your originality report, please ensure that you check the material mentioned above for guidance. Further guidance will be available from formally taught sessions, your Adviser, or the Module Organiser.

 

Other things you should know

Turnitin stores a copy of most work submitted to it in its repository. This does not affect the ownership of or any copyright in the original work.