Assessment Regulations and Academic Misconduct

Assessment regulations and information on plagiarism and how to avoid it.

Assessment Regulations

The University’s assessment regulations can be found on the Academic Services website:

Academic Misconduct

Academic misconduct includes: plagiarism, collusion, falsification of data or evidence, cheating during an examination or assessment, and personation. These terms, and the procedure that is triggered if academic misconduct is suspected, are explained on the University's Academic Misconduct Page.

Plagiarism can be defined as the deliberate use of another person's work in your own work, as if it were your own, without adequate acknowledgement of the original source.

If you do this in work that you submit for assessment, then you are attempting to mislead the examiners. Plagiarism is cheating – trying to claim the credit for something that is not your work.

  • It is essential that you understand how to avoid plagiarism and take care in how you present your work.
  • Any contribution from other sources (such as published works, fellow students' work, items downloaded from the internet) must be properly acknowledged.

Self Plagiarism

Self-plagiarism, which is the submission of your own work that was previously submitted for a different assessment, is also an offence.

  • You should not copy into a new essay text from any previously submitted essay. This would still count as plagiarism, even though you are effectively plagiarising yourself. 
  • However, you may reuse facts, examples or references, as long as you rewrite the text describing them.

Detecting Plagiarism

Plagiarism is a serious offence, because it threatens to undermine the value of a University degree. We take it very seriously, and will impose severe penalties on students who are found guilty of plagiarism.

  • In the Biological Sciences programmes, we use a wide range of methods to detect possible plagiarism, including electronic methods that detect similarities and frequencies of words or phrases.
  • Your work is also compared with the work of students in previous years, to ensure that work is not copied from earlier years.

As with all written work, you should follow the University guidelines on plagiarism. If you are unsure, refer to these guidelines:

What plagiarism is and how to avoid it

Guidance for staff and students on avoiding plagiarism 

Plagiarism Guidelines


The University’s Assessment Regulations gives details of the regulation relating to plagiarism. The following section explains how the BTO operates within these regulations.

  • Work submitted for assessment is processed electronically by “Turnitin”. Plagiarism may be detected using this software or by other means.
  • Students who are suspected of submitting plagiarised work are invited for interview by the School or College Academic Misconduct Officer and asked to explain the similarity between their work and another source.

If plagiarism is established, a reduced mark or a zero mark may be returned for the work, or the disciplinary procedure may be invoked, which can result in expulsion from the University.

  • The Personal Tutor of the student involved is informed of the offence and will keep a record.
  • The incident will remain on the student’s University record for the duration of this or any future degrees at the University of Edinburgh, but will not appear on the transcript. Any future misconduct will automatically be considered as serious.

As a student, you are part of a community of fellow students, academics and other people.  We do want you to talk to one another, to share experiences, and to discuss problems – including the assignments you have been set.

  • If you find a useful source of information in the library, on the internet or anywhere else then you should let other people know about it. That's what being in a community is all about – cooperating and learning together, helping one another to gain the most from your time at university.
  • BUT the crucial point is that, when you come to producing the piece of work that will be assessed, it must be entirely your own work, written by you in your own words, and containing your own interpretations and ideas.
  • If you use other people's words or major ideas, then you should state clearly where they come from. If you use diagrams or photos from published works (as you should do, when appropriate) then you must state where the diagram or image came from.

In other words, it is quite easy to avoid plagiarism, while also being a good friend and neighbour! All you need to do is make sure that you put your own effort into the material you submit for assessment.

To take this point further, it is also permissible to use - with acknowledgement - another student's lab results if, for example you were ill and could not attend the lab class, your experiment has wholly failed to work (although you should then try to suggest reasons for the failure).


For many assignments such as essays, especially in your first or second year, you might find that most or all of the information you need is in one key reference such as a very good recent review of the topic. How can you produce a piece of work of your own without plagiarising the key reference?

To guide you, the following is an extract, with permission, from an original source and we will use it to show what is acceptable and what is not.

The following text comes from: S. van Heyningen (1982) “Similarities in the action of different toxins” in “Molecular Action of Toxins and Viruses” (P. Cohen and S. van Heyningen, eds.) Elsevier, Amsterdam.

 

Cholera toxin is a simple protein easily purified from culture filtrates of Vibrio cholerae.  Its main biological property, as discussed in Chapter 2, is to activate adenylate cyclase in all types of eukaryotic cell. It has a complicated subunit structure (reviewed in detail in [1,2]). There are five B-subunits of molecular weight 11,600; they have been sequenced and have one intrachain disulphide bond. There is also one A-subunit (molecular weight 27,000). Subunit A is secreted by the V. cholerae as a single polypeptide chain, and can be isolated as such if care is taken to minimize proteolysis during the purification. It is however rapidly cleaved into two peptides A1 and A2, which are linked by a disulphide bond. Peptide A1 has a molecular weight of about 22,000 and has been partially sequenced, while the molecular weight of peptide A2 is about 5,000

 

Example 1

If you use that information in an essay as shown below, then this is pure plagiarism. A few trivial changes have been made, but the text is almost unaltered and no acknowledgement has been made of this fact.

 

Cholera toxin is a protein easily purified from culture filtrates of Vibrio cholerae. Its main biological property is to activate adenylate cyclase in all types of eukaryotic cell. It has a complicated subunit structure with five B-subunits of Mr 11,600. There is also one A-subunit (Mr 27,000). Subunit A is secreted by the V. cholerae as a single polypeptide chain, which can be isolated as such if proteolysis during the purification is kept to a minimum. It is however rapidly cleaved into two peptides A1 and A2, which are linked by a disulphide bond.  Peptide A1 has Mr about 22,000 and has been partially sequenced, while peptide A2 has Mr about 5,000.

 

Example 2

The following is another example of plagiarism. Reference has been made to the original source, but it is not explained that everything here, not just the first line, has been copied almost directly from the original.

 

Cholera toxin is a protein easily purified from culture filtrates of Vibrio cholerae1. Its main biological property is to activate adenylate cyclase in all types of eukaryotic cell.  It has a complicated subunit structure with five B-subunits of Mr 11,600. There is also one A-subunit (Mr 27,000). Subunit A is secreted by the V. cholerae as a single polypeptide chain, which can be isolated as such if proteolysis during the purification is kept to a minimum. It is however rapidly cleaved into two peptides A1 and A2, which are linked by a disulphide bond.  Peptide A1 has Mr about 22,000 and has been partially sequenced, while peptide A2 has Mr about 5,000.

 

1van Heyningen, S. (1982) “Similarities in the action of different toxins”, in “Molecular Action of Toxins and Viruses”, (Cohen, P. & van Heyningen, S, eds.) Elsevier, Amsterdam.

 

Example 3

Nobody could accuse the following of plagiarism, since the writer makes it quite clear that the material has been copied; however the writer couldn’t expect to get much credit for this “copy and paste” job, which shows no evidence of any thought or understanding.

 

Cholera toxin is an interesting protein with a complex structure. Van Heyningen1 has explained that it is “a simple protein easily purified from culture filtrates of Vibrio cholerae. Its main biological property is to activate adenylate cyclase in all types of eukaryotic cell. It has a complicated subunit structure. There are five B-subunits of molecular weight 11,600; they have been sequenced and have one intrachain disulphide bond. There is also one A-subunit (molecular weight 27,000). Subunit A is secreted by the V. cholerae as a single polypeptide chain, and can be isolated as such if care is taken to minimize proteolysis during the purification. It is however rapidly cleaved into two peptides A1 and A2, which are linked by a disulphide bond. Peptide A1 has a molecular weight of about 22,000 and has been partially sequenced, while the molecular weight of peptide A2 is about 5,000”.

 

1van Heyningen, S. (1982) “Similarities in the action of different toxins”, in “Molecular Action of Toxins and Viruses”, (Cohen, P. & van Heyningen, S, eds.) Elsevier, Amsterdam.

 

Example 4

The following is not wonderful, because careful examination could show that the writer had used only one source (guess which?), but it is not plagiarism, and it is not cheating.

 

Cholera toxin is an interesting protein that can be purified quite easily from the medium in which Vibrio cholerae is grown; it is an activator of the enzyme adenylate cyclase in eukaryotic cells, and has a complex structure1. The protein is made up of five single-chain B-subunits (molecular weight 11,600), whose sequence shows them to have one disulphide bond, and an A-subunit (molecular weight 27,000), which can be isolated from the V. cholerae medium as a single chain if proteolysis is avoided, but is easily cleaved into two peptides A1 (molecular weight about 22,000) and A2 (about 5,000).

(To show that we practise what we preach, we should acknowledge that this example was written by Prof Simon van Heyningen, and it is based on an original by Dr David French, Department of History, University College London, whose own text used an example more relevant to History.)

 

One final point

Students often are tempted to add lots of references to the end of an essay, to make it seem as if a lot of different sources were consulted when, in fact, all those references have been copied from one source - the original review or book that you used.

The honest way to get round this problem is to write: "Jones and Smith 1980 (cited in van Heyningen, 1982)".  List only those references that you have actually read and use them to support the key factual statements. 


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