Unisa's Policy for Copyright Infringement and Plagiarism states emphatically that plagiarism is unacceptable.
This means that your work, including your research outline, must be the result of your own skill and labour. Copying from another person's work without giving due acknowledgement by means of references to the author or reproducing/adapting another's work (or parts thereof) without clear acknowledgement and details of the publication concerned is plagiarism.
Your application for admission to Unisa will be declined immediately if any of the following is detected:
- You fail to clearly indicate (eg with quotation marks, indenting or through the use of different fonts) phrases or passages taken verbatim (word for word) from a published or unpublished text without crediting the original author and text.
- You paraphrase an article, book or electronic text without acknowledging the source(s) and the author(s) of the work. This amounts to reproducing a text in different words than the author, changing the word order of the text, or changing the sentence type/style of the author.
- You use more than a substantial part of the work of any author, even if you acknowledge the source and the author.
- You use a patch-writing (cut-and-paste) method, which means that you take pieces of another person's work (including those from the internet) and blend it with your own words and phrases without acknowledging the author and the source of the work.