Plagiarism

Last month, I had an assignment to make a critical review of two article. They provided us a workshop by EDU (Education Development Unit), that is a unit that was established to provide teaching and learning support in my faculty, about "Writing Critical Review". I attended the workshop and two days later I came with my draft to EDU. She, one of EDU staff that gave the workshop, checked my draft and suggested some changes, mostly in grammar and word choice. Several days later I collected final version of my critical review (I uploaded the softcopy to the university's e-learning website and I submitted the hardcopy at the workshop).

Yesterday, some of my friends got theirs back. One of them told me that many people got bad marks and some of them thought that the workshop was not helpful. It was like a reminder that if somebody told me something I should be suspicious (see ACE Leadership Competition - First Day)

Today I just got mine back. The result was sticked to the last page. When I read my result, in "Comments" section, my tutor wrote "Make sure you follow the appropriate guidelines in terms of citation so you won't be mistaken for plagiarism. You need to see me about this issue after class!"

So. after class I went to his office and he told me that I was suspected to do plagiarism. The softcopy that I uploaded was checked and the result was my work has a certain level of similarity with others (other works, the article itself, wikipedia.com, etc.) so there was a possibility that I plagiarize. Thankfully my tutor had read my work and he trusted me, so I was free. He told me to not put too many citation without giving appropriate credits to the author, I should paraphrase it. In fact, I imitated and paraphrased all of the citation (it was also because I did not want the meaning of the sentence changed), but the plagiarism detector also can detect it (it may also analyze numbers of words in each sentence). So, I thought next time it is better to write it using my own words.