As a student, you will be required to use sources such as books, journal articles and web articles to enrich and expand on the content of your assignments and projects for assessment. Failure to do so correctly and without acknowledgement may result in a piece of submitted work being seen as plagiarised, resulting in rather severe consequences for the student concerned.
A source is any type of resource that you may use to obtain information which will assist you in completing your submissions for assessment purposes. This includes information from textbooks, encyclopedias, journals, TV, radio, the Internet and other people, for example.
An acknowledgement is a description of the source used by the student, which will enable someone else to also locate it. It is accompanied by an indication of which parts of the information in the submission came from that particular source.
Plagiarism can be defined as “the use, without giving reasonable and appropriate credit to or acknowledging the author or source, of another person’s original work, whether such work is made up of code, formulas, ideas, language, research, strategies, writing of other form” (Stanford, 2015).