Studying Online;Succeeding through Distance Learning at University

set up your own naming convention so that you do not submit 
the wrong paper. 

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Coping with online assessment 185 
HOW TO AVOID BEING ACCUSED OF 
PLAGIARISM 
Plagiarism is the use of someone else’s work as though it were 
your own. It is a form of cheating because even if your work con-
tains a small amount of plagiarism, the essay, for instance, is not 
entirely your own work. Yet you could be marked as though it 
were your own work. Tis would mean you were obtaining credit 
fraudulently because some of the marks would inevitably refect 
the work done by someone else, not you. Te fact is, though, the 
vast majority of plagiarism is unintentional. Only a small propor-
tion of students deliberately set out to deceive and cheat their way 
to good results. However, signifcant numbers of students end up 
facing an “Academic Misconduct” investigation because it appears 
they have cheated when they actually did not do so. Tese stu-
dents unintentionally copied material. However, the result is still 
the same; not everything in their assignment is their own work. 
So, why should they be credited for it? 
For online students, the opportunity to cheat, even unintentional-
ly, is often easier than for traditional campus-based students. On 
campus, students will often be seen in the library with a textbook 
and a notepad. Tose studying online, though, may just have sev-
eral tabs open on their browser and just copy and paste materi-
al into their digital notetaking system. It’s easier to do this when 
you are entirely online than for students who are on campus. Te 
result of this way of working, though, is that an online student’s 
digital notetaking fles can be full of copied material. When the 
student completes an assignment using their “notes”, they forget 
where the original material came from. Tey assume it is their 
own notes and copy what they believe is their own work into the 
assignment when it is someone else’s material. 
Various studies of online students and the degree of cheating 
appear to provide conficting results. Some studies point to-
wards a higher level of plagiarism amongst online students than 
those on campus. However, other research suggests there is no 

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