Plagiarism, its Types and Levels

Plagiarism is a serious problem in the learning institutions. The easy access and simplicity of copying and pasting from numerous materials

obtainable from the internet worsens the problem. It is taken as a critical offence in the practical world. This is because the offender steals the

work of other people and presents it as his or her own (Abigael, 2010). In this essay the meaning of plagiarism, its types and levels are discussed.

Plagiarism refers to the act of taking someone else’s writing, song, idea or conversation and submitting it as your own. The information can be

taken from books, web pages, songs, articles, interviews or any other means. Any time you summarize, paraphrase, or take words, phrases,

sentences from somebody’s work, it is compulsory to acknowledge the source within your document by use of internal citation. Otherwise,

listing the source in a bibliography is not enough, it will be considered as plagiarism if there is no proper quoting, citing or acknowledging a

person’s work.

There exists various types of plagiarism and they all violate academic honesty. Firstly, direct plagiarism where a section of a person’s work is

copied without quotation marks and without acknowledgement. This is academically dishonest, unethical and leads to punishments. Secondly,

self-plagiarism which occurs when one submits his or her own work more than once or mixes some parts of the earlier work without permission

from the involved. Thirdly, mosaic plagiarism which involves using phrases from a different work without use of quotation marks or keeping

the meaning and structure of the original but using synonyms for the author’s words. Finally, there is accidental plagiarism where there is

misquotes of sources, negligence of citing sources and paraphrasing using similar sentences, or words as the source unintentionally without

recognition. Involvement to any of these types of plagiarism is taken seriously and subject to disciplinary actions.
There are five plagiarism levels as discussed below

Any of the following situations are classified in level one. When a whole paper is copied and the name of the original author is replaced with

another one, or another case is when a large part (more than 50%) of the original document is copied and there are no quotation marks used, no

reference, credit or bibliography. Instances where many papers written by the same author has been found to contain plagiarism and the overall

plagiarism adds to more than 50% is another case in this level. Additionally, this level contain the most extreme cases of plagiarism.

Level 2

Copying a portion (greater than 20%and up to 50%) of an original document to another paper without using quotations, no bibliography,

reference or credit notice and uncredited word by word copying within many papers by the same author summing to a large portion (greater

than 20%and up to 50%) are the plagiarism cases classified in level two.

Level 3

Cases in this level are where sections (up to 20%) of the original paper are used in another paper and the quotation marks, reference or credit

notice are not provided. The copied sections can be sentences, paragraphs or even illustrations.

Level 4
Where a sentence has been rearranged, changing few words and phrases are the instances of paraphrasing improperly. Failing to reference or

credit becomes plagiarism classified in this level.

Level 5

Cases classified in this level involve verbatim copying and providing credit notice but the quotation marks are absent or unclearly showing the

specific document copied.

References