What is plagiarism and how does it relate to how I use Socratic?

Plagiarism comes in many forms but it means using someone else's work and not giving credit. It is the practice of using work that is not yours and making it look like it is.

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While copying an entire webpage, a paragraph from a webpage, or a sentence from another webpage are all considered plagiarism, so is copying word-for-word directly from one of your text books, a movie, an interview, etc. These are some of the more blatant forms of plagiarism and this is not allowed on Socratic.

Let's say you find a paragraph you like, and you change a few words here or there. Is that okay? No, it's really not. Changing one or two words is a less obvious form of plagiarism but it isn't acceptable either.

You need to take that paragraph and rewrite it entirely in your own words. If this isn't possible, you should use quotes (see below). Once you've rewritten it, you should still cite where that information came from if it wasn't your own. While not every contributor to Socratic does this, paraphrasing or summarizing without citing where the idea came from would still be considered plagiarism if a student did this in school or a journalist did this in an article.

If you want to use information from somewhere else (a website, a dictionary, a book, and so forth) and you want to use the same, exact words, you need to put them in quotation marks and then you need to cite or tell us where that quote comes from. For the purposes of Socratic, this often means giving the website you used or naming the book and author you are referring to.

Why should you care? Think about how you would feel if you worked really hard on a paper and then someone else copied it and turned in the exact same paper. You both get excellent grades. Is that fair?

Here is an excellent source on plagiarism aimed for students. More information can also be found in this post about four common misconceptions about plagiarism.