Module 6: Using information responsibly 
As a student who uses information and writes assignments, you should be aware of two important issues, plagiarism and copyright.
Read the two sections of this module carefully. Make sure you visit the links provided on these pages. This will help you to answer the related quiz questions.
Read the learning outcomes for this module.
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is the act of presenting another person's work or ideas as your own.
Plagiarism is a serious breach of ethics at UNSW and is not taken lightly.
Avoiding plagiarism involves:
- forming your own opinions from the work that others have published
- acknowledging the original author of information that you have quoted, summarised or paraphrased from books, articles, web pages etc.
- knowing the types of works that must be referenced
e.g. books, articles, web pages, statistics, photographs etc.
- knowing how to use the appropriate referencing style
e.g. Harvard, APA
Essential reading
The Learning Centre has a comprehensive section on plagiarism and the issues around it. There are useful tools to guide you in recognising plagiarism and developing the skills to help you avoid it.
For other aspects of academic integrity, refer to the UNSW A-Z Student Guide: Ethical use of Scholarly Materials
Other useful sites
- Arizona State University Libraries have set out some practical steps that you could follow to help you avoid plagiarism. They provide two learning documents: Avoiding Plagiarism and an Integrating Sources Activity Quiz. Both of these documents use APA referencing style to illustrate their examples
- University of Technology, Sydney has developed a useful tutorial, Avoiding Plagiarism using Harvard referencing style