When writing essays, always identify your sources for specific information and, where appropriate, the ideas which you use. It is bad academic practice for a student to fail to do so, just as it would be for an author writing a book or learned article. Copying without acknowledgement from a printed source is as unacceptable as plagiarising another student's essay.

It is wrong to reproduce and present other sources as your own work. For example a passage from another person's writing where minor changes have been made, e.g., random alteration of words or phrases, omission or rearrangement of occasional sentences or phrases within the passage. This remains plagiarism even if the source is acknowledged in footnotes.

Unacknowledged quotation, disguised borrowing, or near-copying will be treated as plagiarism and penalised according to its extent and gravity.

Please read the Department's Statement on Plagarism and Part B of the University's Regulation on Essays, Dissertations, Reports and Other Assessed Work, not Undertaken under Examination Condition. This can be found in the University Regulations for the Invigilation of Examinations online at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/gov/calendar/section2/regulations/cheating/. Please note that in extreme cases, the penalty for plagiarism is a grade of zero in the whole module.

The Philosophy Department uses a system called 'turnin' on Tabula to check all submitted work for plagarism. This check reference sources and records the amount of similarity between the submitted work and sources as a percentage. In the last few years the University disciplinary machinery has imposed penalties in several cases on students who have been convicted of plagiarism in assessed work. If you are uncertain about what constitutes plagiarism, please talk it over with either your module tutor, personal tutor, or the Director of Graduate Studies.