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Accidental plagiarism?? Maybe?

I do all of my work at the library and tweak grammar/spelling when I get home. Whilst writing the essay I was struggling to form my own example of the mesosystem and so looked online for some examples to give me an idea of my own. I found and watched a YouTube video which explained the system really well so I included that in my essay, highlighted it as red to make sure I changed it and formed my own when I went home that evening. I did go home and create another example in a different word document with the intention of including it in my essay before submitting. The day of the deadline I had skimmed through my essay, highlight the text to make it new times Roman and clicked black ink. This erased the previously highlighted red ink and I was completely unaware that I hadn’t included my own example. It wasn’t until I decided to look at the date which we’d receive our grade back that I skimmed through the essay and saw it highlighted as a high similarity percentage that I began panicking and realising my mistake. Initially I planned to resubmit the essay but realised I’d then be gapped as a late submission so decided to email my tutor and I am still waiting for the response. I put a lot of effort and research into my essay and would never intentionally hinder my grade by plagiarising. I am extremely upset, stressed and sorry about this. At the time of this my Grandmother was at hospital due to having an operation as she had lung cancer and I was not in the best frame of mind in terms of attention span. I understand this shouldn’t be used as an excuse for my negligence but it was a genuine mistake. I submitted the essay on the 29th and it’s the 20th now, nobody has emailed me about it or excuses me of plagiarising and my plagiarism score was 15% but 7% of that was for the four lines marked as from a website that I hadn’t even used. Really worried as I get good grades of about 70% so I’m panicking that I’ve just ruined uni for myself.
Reply 1
Original post by Sarahjaye
I do all of my work at the library and tweak grammar/spelling when I get home. Whilst writing the essay I was struggling to form my own example of the mesosystem and so looked online for some examples to give me an idea of my own. I found and watched a YouTube video which explained the system really well so I included that in my essay, highlighted it as red to make sure I changed it and formed my own when I went home that evening. I did go home and create another example in a different word document with the intention of including it in my essay before submitting. The day of the deadline I had skimmed through my essay, highlight the text to make it new times Roman and clicked black ink. This erased the previously highlighted red ink and I was completely unaware that I hadn’t included my own example. It wasn’t until I decided to look at the date which we’d receive our grade back that I skimmed through the essay and saw it highlighted as a high similarity percentage that I began panicking and realising my mistake. Initially I planned to resubmit the essay but realised I’d then be gapped as a late submission so decided to email my tutor and I am still waiting for the response. I put a lot of effort and research into my essay and would never intentionally hinder my grade by plagiarising. I am extremely upset, stressed and sorry about this. At the time of this my Grandmother was at hospital due to having an operation as she had lung cancer and I was not in the best frame of mind in terms of attention span. I understand this shouldn’t be used as an excuse for my negligence but it was a genuine mistake. I submitted the essay on the 29th and it’s the 20th now, nobody has emailed me about it or excuses me of plagiarising and my plagiarism score was 15% but 7% of that was for the four lines marked as from a website that I hadn’t even used. Really worried as I get good grades of about 70% so I’m panicking that I’ve just ruined uni for myself.


If it's your first offence and you're in first year, unis are generally more lenient. However, you should have a course handbook (which may be on the uni website) that will tell you the rules.

Going forward, you'll need a new strategy. It's good that you can explain how it happened, but what are you going to do to make sure it doesn't happen again? If you are called to any form of disciplinary meeting, showing that you understand the problem and have found a solution will be very helpful.
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