GEP Medicine in Society Guide 2024/25

Plagiarism is the use or presentation of the work of another person, including another student, as your own work (or as part of your own work) without acknowledging the source. This includes submitting the work of someone else as your own, re-submitting your own previously submitted work, and extensive copying from someone else’s work without proper referencing. 

Copying from the Internet without acknowledging the source is also plagiarism. You may use brief quotes from the published or unpublished work of other persons, but you must always show that they are quotations by putting them inside quotation marks, giving the source (for example, in a footnote), and listing the work in the bibliography at the end of your own piece of work. 

It is also plagiarism to summarise someone else’s ideas or judgments without reference to the source. Following investigation if work is deemed to be plagiarised the student will automatically incur an outright fail. Depending on the nature and scale of the offence, more severe penalties may be incurred in line with existing College policies. For full details on the School’s Plagiarism Policy please refer to the MBBS Assessment & Progression Handbook.


You are able to use AI technology to support your written work, however you must ensure that it is used in a way that does not constitute plagiarism. All work submitted must be your own.  

AI can provide support in terms of prompting deeper reflection, structuring work, making suggestions for topics to include within a body of text, finding relevant literature etc., but should not be used to write the assignment. 

QMUL have some guidance on the use of AI - https://www.qmul.ac.uk/library/academic-skills/student-guide-to-generative-ai/  - and there is a module on QMPlus with practical support on how and when to use AI we recommend working through - https://qmplus.qmul.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=21898. 

In 2023 the academic misconduct policy was updated to include the following text under the definition of plagiarism: "Unauthorised or unacknowledged text manipulation which undermines the integrity of an assessment (including the use of paraphrasing software, generative artificial intelligence or machine translation such that the work submitted cannot be considered wholly the student’s own)." 

Students will be asked to complete a probity statement as written below prior to submission of work.

"I certify that this assignment represents my own work.  I have not used any unauthorised or unacknowledged assistance or sources in completing it including free or commercial systems or services offered on the internet."