Student Helpdesk

Loughborough College is committed to reducing the incidence of plagiarism in students’
work across all delivery programmes and to ensure that effective procedures are in place
where they do occur.

For the purposes of this policy, plagiarism is defined as:

• Copying and passing off as the student’s own, the whole or part(s) of another person’s work, including artwork, images, words, computer-generated words (including internet sources), thoughts, inventions and/or discoveries, whether published or not, with or without the originator’s permission and without appropriately acknowledging the source.
• Collusion by working collaboratively with other students to produce work that is submitted as an individual student’s work. This excludes work that has been set as a defined team assignment. Where teamwork presentations are used and then incorporated into individual assignments the student MUST ensure that they input using their own words and style.
• Presenting an existing idea as new and original, which could be construed as copyright theft.
• Using websites or artificial intelligence (such as ChatGPT or BARD) to generate or re-produce content for assessments / or part thereof and presenting it as your own work. This will be counted as not the learner’s own work which may result in an investigation and/or disciplinary action being taken and may be reported to the awarding body.

All students who have coursework as an assessed element of their programme of study will be provided with support and guidance on the definition of plagiarism, and how to avoid it as part of their study skills’ tutorials. Students studying at the appropriate levels will also learn how to undertake referencing and citation techniques.

Incidences of plagiarism identified by tutors in student’s work will be dealt with in line with the College’s Learner Disciplinary Policy (see Section 3 Types of Disciplinary Breaches – Major Breach (Stage 2).

Guidance for students on study skills, which includes avoidance of plagiarism, referencing, citation and good practice in assignment writing, will be delivered as part of lessons and tutorials, set at the appropriate level of the student’s programme of study.

Guidance to consider and remember to avoid plagiarism:

• Assignments provide a vehicle for assessing your performance during your module and contribute to your overall module result
• Assignments assist you in understanding your subject and aid your learning on the module
• When you attempt to use the ideas and terms of the module independently, you learn more thoroughly and develop your own writing style
• You are likely to perform better in examinations if you have learned how to write your own answers to questions in assignments
• Students will be asked to declare that the work is their own when submitting assessments and sign assignment declaration sheets (if applicable).

Curriculum Teams will be encouraged to use an online submission for student coursework where appropriate, which undertakes plagiarism checks, for example Turnitin.

• Turnitin which carries out the equivalent of an internet search, looks for matches between the text included in a piece of work submitted by a student with all forms of information and resources publicly available on the internet. Turnitin is used to check for cases of direct copying, and/or not properly referencing various types of source materials. It can also be used to compare each student’s assignments with the module materials and other commonly used or provided references. For each assignment submitted to Turnitin, an ‘originality’ report is produced showing the percentage of text that matches specific websites

Best practice guidance for tutors and the others working to support Loughborough College students on coursework and plagiarism will be provided.

The full FE Plagiarism policy can be found on the Loughborough College website by following the link below.

FE Plagiarism Policy