No, it is not. Plagiarism is a form of academic integrity violation, but academic integrity is not just limited to plagiarism.

Cheating: involves unauthorised receipt or giving of any information or material which will be used to determine academic credit, and includes copying from another student's test or assignment, allowing another student to copy from your test or assignment, or using materials such as textbooks, notes, or formula lists during a test without permission.

Bribery: involves bribing someone for an academic advantage, or accepting such a bribe (i.e. a student offers a lecturer money, goods, or services in exchange for a passing grade, and a lecturer accepts this bribe/ OR a lecturer offers a student a passing grade in exchange for money, goods, or services, and a student accepts this bribe)

Misrepresentation: any act or omission that is intended to deceive a lecturer for academic advantage, and it includes a student lying to a lecturer in an attempt to increase a mark or lying when confronted with allegations of academic dishonesty.

Conspiracy: working together with one or more persons to commit or attempt to commit academic dishonesty.

Fabrication: refers to the use of invented or misrepresentative information, such as in the sciences, when students create or alter experimental data.

Collusion: the act of two or more students working together on an individual assignment or test (i.e. when it was not assigned as a group task).

Duplicate Submission: occurs when a student submits the same assignment for two different modules/ courses.

Academic Misconduct: the violation of university policies by tampering with grades or by obtaining and/or distributing any part of a test, assignment or examination before it was administered.

Improper Computer/Calculator/ Mobile phone Use: involved unauthorised use of computer or calculator or mobile phone programs or use of information/ answers stored on these devices which will be submitted for a grade.

Improper Online and Blended Course Use: includes accepting or providing outside help on online assignments or tests, or obtaining test materials or questions before the test is administered. [source]

Plagiarism: see next

• It is the use or incorporation of another person's work or ideas in, or as a basis for, one's own work offered for academic consideration or credit or for public presentation or publication, without proper acknowledgement. Or simply, it is taking someone else’s words, work, or ideas and passing them off as your own, without any attribution to the original creator.

Complete Plagiarism: occurs when a student/ researcher submits someone else’s work in their own name. Contract cheating where a student pays somebody to write a paper for him/her, then submitting that paper with his/her name on it, is an act of complete plagiarism.

Direct/ verbatim plagiarism: the word-for-word transcription/ copy and paste of a section of someone else’s work, without attribution and without quotation marks.

Paraphrasing plagiarism: this involves the use of someone else’s writing with some minor changes in the sentences and using it as one’s own. It may involve using synonyms to replace original words, but the original idea remains the same and plagiarism occurs.

Self or Auto Plagiarism: happens when an author reuses significant portions of his or her previously published work without attribution.

Mosaic/ Patchwork Plagiarism: occurs when a student/ author copies material from several writers and rearranges that material with no attempt to acknowledge the original sources.

Source-based Plagiarism: occurs when a writer consults a secondary source in their work but provides credit the primary source from which that secondary source is derived, even though the author had no access to the primary source.

Inaccurate authorship: this happens when an individual contributes to an academic work but does not get credit for it/ OR an individual gets credit without contributing to the work (e.g. a student’s name added to a group assignment to which they have not contributed.

Accidental Plagiarism: may occur because of neglect, mistakes, or unintentional paraphrasing or poor academic writing. Whether intended or unintended, there is no excuse for plagiarism and the consequences may be the same. [source]

There are many ways in which plagiarism can be detected, but the most effective and reliable one is using text-matching software such as Turnitin, Ouriginal, iThenticate, etc. that scan the academic work and compares its content with content in other sources. There are also software programs that can detect plagiarism of software programming code or AI generated content or assignment.

There is no such a thing as s plagiarism detection software, as there is no software system that can detect plagiarism per se. There is only what is called a text-matching or originality software.

Text matching or originality software compares electronically submitted assignments against a database of documents by showing the percentage of the submission that matches other sources and produces an originality report which highlights the text matches and, where possible, displays the matching text and its immediate context. Text matching software do not make a judgement about whether a student has plagiarised. It is the duty of the lecturer to determine if the similarity reported by the software amounts to plagiarism or not. [source]

Not necessarily. There are various causes for a high similarity score of an assignment or research report. A student may have used a lot of content from one specific source, or may have used too many direct quotations. In each of these two instances, that would not count as plagiarism, just poor academic writing, IF all sources used have been correctly cited. Therefore, you may have Student A with a low similarity score (e.g. 18%), but that whole amount, as small as it is, may have been written verbatim with no acknowledgement of original sources. While you may have Student B with a 45% similarity score, but all the sources have been cited correctly. So, who has plagiarised between the two? Student A of course. But Student B still needs to improve their assignment by making sure that their own original voice is present and the work is not simply a resubmission of other’s work, even if the student has cited and referenced all the work. Nevertheless, it helps to know that all plagiarised work have a high similarity score (unless tempered with), but not all work with a high similarity score are plagiarised.

A similarity score of 100% is quite rare, but usually happens when the student submits work that was previously submitted. If this work was submitted by the student himself or herself as an earlier draft before the final version was submitted, this can be considered to be an issue of wrongful archiving of the student’s draft in the software’s database. All submitted work is archived in the software’s database for future reference. But assignment drafts can be exempted from this database archiving so the student receives the similarity report, improves it, before submitting the final work. Exempting assignments from being archived in the repository is a technical process to be followed by the lecturer when setting up an assignment. If a student experiences this issue, s/he must inform the lecturer concerned.

An assignment or any academic work with a high similarity score is an indication that such work has a large amount of unoriginal content that has been sourced elsewhere, whether correctly cited or not. The first thing for the student to do is to seek the advice of the lecturer of the assignment/ task at hand.

Secondly, the student should check the diversity of sources used in the assignment or research report. Overreliance on one source is usually a sign of poor academic work unless the single source was part of the assignment requirement.

Apart from diversifying sources used, the student must re-examine the written work and derive the essence and core meaning from the sources, then paraphrase the ideas, while still citing the sources correctly.

One most important piece of advice is for the student to take additional academic writing lessons/ classes to improve the quality of their writing.

Not necessarily. Unless the student work is in local African languages that may not be well represented online, it is expected that each academic work should at least have some similarity to other online sources. In fact, an assignment with 0% is as suspicious as an assignment with an overly high similarity score. The goal here is not for students to get low similarity scores no matter what. The goal is to improve students’ academic writing, cut out plagiarism while still allowing reasonable and correct use of academic literature and other sources in the process.

According to the current Policy on Academic Integrity (available on the Intranet for lecturers and on Moodle Common Spaces for students) the acceptable similarity index threshold currently stands at 30%. This percentage is often mistaken for plagiarism – as in the percentage of plagiarism allowed. NO, this is NOT correct. As stated, a threshold percentage refers to the degree to which students’ work are expected to have unoriginal content, i.e. content sourced from elsewhere other than the student’s own ideas. Although this 30% threshold has been set in the Policy, other factors must be considered when interpreting students’ originality scores.

Firstly, text-matching software companies like Turnitin do NOT advise on the strict usage of such threshold scores because they do not mean much as far as plagiarism is concerned (please see “Does a high similarity index/ report of my assignment mean that I have plagiarised?” above).

Secondly, different academic disciplines make use of original sources differently. For example Chemistry and Accounting students with assignments requiring them to provide specific correct answers may end up having a high similarity scores as their assignments get compared with each other and they may all have the same correct answers. Similarly, a law student who has been required to use a specific legal text and quote it, may have a high similarity score if all other students write in the same manner, thus ending up with assignments quoting the same legal text. Therefore the 30% threshold should be interpreted within a wider context. Assignments that require students to express their own ideas should naturally be expected to conform to a threshold like this.

Please consult the referencing style manual in your School or Department. If you do not know which referencing style or rules apply to you, please consult your lecturer or the University Library.

If the paper/assignment is a first submission, it can take up to ten minutes to generate. If the paper/ assignment is a resubmission overwriting a previous submission, the Originality Report will take 24 hours to generate. [source]

It is advisable to consult the librarians at your campus or your academic writing lecturers/ experts for support.

Turnitin has a feature that flags text or content that is likely to have been generated using AI. However the lecturer would still have to evaluate and make a decision on the recommendation of the software.