What is plagarism?

• All students (to whom I serve as supervisor/examiner/reviewer) are expected to strictly follow rules against plagarism, or risk total failure at the subject and/or termination from University.
• You must sign a declaration of originality form and submit it to me before I can review your work.
• The following, unless stated and properly credited, in any work must be the original creation of students beyond a reasonable doubt:

1. All sentences or paragraphs
2. Line of thought. Yes, if it is obvious that you are paraphrasing (rewriting the same material in another style) whole paragraphs, sections, pages, it is considered plagarism. Read the examples posted outside my office.
3. All figures
4. All tables
5. All equations
6. All experimental results

• If you copy from another source (copyrighted or not) one or more sentences, you must quote the copied portion in its entirety, plus add a reference at the end, for example:

    This is my own sentence. According to [reference at the beginning or],
    "This is a copied sentence. This is the second
    copied sentence. This is the third copied sentence."
    [reference at the end]
  

• Some lazy students simply quote verbatim whole chapters or sections, e.g.:

    Chapter 2 Related work [5]
  
    1 Data mining
    "Data mining refers to the ....
  
    {after 10 pages of copied and quoted material}
  
    ... Support vector machines performed the best." [5]
  

Well, this is not plagarism and you won't be penalized for that. However, this simply shows that your IQ is no higher than a photocopy/xerox machine. Do you think NTU should grant a Bachelor of Engineering degree to a xerox machine? Not that churning out xerox machines graduates is news, but there is currently an oversupply of walking xerox machines (many with foreign degrees earning superscale salaries like >S$100K per month) in Singapore, so NTU has no choice but to produce graduates better than xerox machines for their own good; so that NTU graduates can survive in a market inundated with foreign-trained walking xerox machines.

• The original source of all copied (cut&pasted) figures/tables/equations/results must be properly credited in the caption, for example:

    Figure 1. A neural network [source here or...].
    (reproduced with permission from John Doe[source here]).
  
    Table 1. Results for SVM [source here or ...].
    (reproduced with permission from John Doe[source here]).
  

• Additional steps are needed if you wish to reproduce copyrighted works. You must sought the original author's permission to re-use their copyrighted material and acknowledge their granted permission either in the figure caption, footnote, or acknowledgement section. If the copied material has a creative commons style of licence, you must also state so.
• As long as there is a copyright statement such as '© 2005 Kuiyu CHANG' anywhere in the piece of work, everything contained therein is protected by international copyright laws. This means that if you copy a copyrighted work, you can get sued in additional to getting expelled from University.
• To save the trouble, you are strongly encouraged to create your own drawings and write your own sentences.
  • Look at a number of different reference material, understand and fully digest it
  • Keep your own notes about the material, than start writing based on your own notes without looking at the original source.
  • It is better to write short concise sentences than to copy pages of text from elsewhere.
  • Use your brain more often to create. Your brain is like a muscle, it will shrink if you don't use it.
• Read up China Digital Times to appreciate how plagarism can basically end your career.
• Also refer to IEEE stance on plagarism, and the different categories