Fwd: Plagiarism and Turnitin.com
Nguyen Hoang
I do have another important suggestion to all of you.
Two of you in the last few days have asked me about plagiarism. I have told them to please be sure to turn in their dissertations to turnitin.com to see what level of similarity there appears to be between their dissertations and other journal articles, textbooks, dissertations that are part of the turnitin collection of previously written materials. You can do this as many times as you like while writing your dissertation. Since you are down to your final three weeks I would still recommend that you do it at least one time before officially turning in your dissertation. If you wait until you officially submit your dissertation to Leeds Met U and you have a very high similarity rate by then it is TOO LATE.
What is a high similarity rate? I asked faculty at Leeds Met U last year when I first served as a dissertation supervisor. There is no ONE number above which you do not want to be. Rather, I was told that students should be more concerned with the total similarity number being comprised of many small sections being part of many other papers, textbooks etc VERSUS having that total number (perhaps 40%) being comprised of one or two sources. In that case it looks like you have copied your dissertation for many pages from one or two dissertations or journal articles or whatever that is n the turnitin system.
That being said, it is NORMAL to have percentages of 10 or 20 or even higher when you turn in your dissertation to turnitin.com. That is usually because in the literature review section where you cite material from a textbook or even wikipedia.com you are paraphrasing (putting in your own words) what is in the textbook. This is where you must be sure to cite (give credit) to the material in the textbook. For example: (Kotler, 2009). If a section in your dissertation is word for word be sure to place " marks at the beginning or end of the material you have copied word for word followed by the citation (Kotler, 2010, page 290).
It is very important to turn in your paper to turnitin.com at least one time before you turn in your official copy to Leeds at which time it is too late to add references and reword material if the similarity number (percent) is too high and from only a few sources. Why? Because back in MAITF01 in Ha Noi out of 55 students 11 or 12 did not graduate due to this issue. Their dissertations were all turned in one year ago in August. Fortunately, out of my 16 students only 1 student did not graduate. The other 10 or 11 students out of the remaining 39 or 40 students were assigned to one of the other four dissertation supervisors. You DO NOT want to have spent the past eight months working on your dissertations only to not graduate. If this is an issue for you because of the high turnitin similarity number, please write to your supervisors directly. Also, in the very slim chance that you are fully aware that you have taken all of your material for many pages of your dissertation from someone else's previous dissertation please let me know that immediately too. Thank you! :) Changes can then be made before it is too late.
Have a good week
On behalf of DS
Liem Le
Nguyen
Cover thi dong bia cung nhu cac khoa truoc thoi em, co sample trong thu vien hoac muon Mai admin do.
Regards,
Nguyen Hoang
Sent from my iPad 2
Minh Quang Le
Thanks,