Plagiarism on first year (please help)

Hey everyone.

I have a question about plagiarism on first year. I'm studying psychology and I used a second year's data to analyse instead of collecting and analysing mine. There was four of us and each one of us was going to do something. One of us was going to collect the data, the other one was going to analyse it, another one was going to fill the ethics form etc. I ended up doing everything myself as they didn't do anything until the last minute. Anyway I e-mailed my lecturer and she didn't reply back so I asked one of my coursemate for his opinion. He said he didn't collect any data and booked ab interview with the lecturer and appearently the lecturer told him to "make some data up". And then I thought it may not be a bad idea to use my friend's data as mine. When I analyse and type the data inside a table and uploaded it to turnitin it's highlighted and shows it as plagiarism. The similarity for that particular thins is below %1 but I'm really worried that I might fail or even expelled from uni. Is it likely that this will happen to me or do you think I'll be able to dodge a bullet with a warning as i'm first year and it's one of my first assignments?

Thanks

Reply 1

SlowlorisIncognito

I don't think you should have done this without confirming it was OK with your tutor. However, depending on the data, it may end up being very similar for all students and your lecturers may ignore data based similarities for this sort of assignment.

However, if part of the assignment was to collect your own data and this is discovered, it's very likely that your grade for this piece of work will be reduced. Equally, although you won't be expelled for a first offense, it means if you make a referencing mistake or have other problems in the future, you're less likely to be given benefit of the doubt.

If you've already submitted, there's not much you can do, but if you have time, try going to your lecturer's office hours and discussing the situation with her. She may say it's ok to use other data, and then you won't have to worry.