HOME :: Legal / Copyright Protect Yourself From Plagiarism By Christie Lagrande Platinum Quality Author Christie Lagrande Level: Platinum Christie

Have you ever been on a team project with someone who plagiarized? Or did you ever have someone cheat off you while you were in school? Were you the cheater? Well, believe it or not, plagiarism is quite a big deal that can lead to an F, getting kicked out of school, getting banned from the academic community, and even put you in jail for fraud.

When you are working on a team project make sure that you make your team members submit their project to the entire team for review at least 2 days prior to the due date. In addition, you should check their work thoroughly and make sure you copy and paste full sentences in Google to make sure that they have not made exact copies. You can always in close the exact phrase with quotation marks and see if there is any other references to their exact sentence on the web.

Once you get burned once, it is very easy to prefer to work on projects by yourself. But do not be discouraged. As you get further in life you will start to find that people have more at stake when it comes to the business world and will often times plagiarize less. However, you will still find people who cheat at work so make sure that you lock your computer when you are away from your desk, and always keep your original documents filed somewhere in a locked cabinet. It is far too easy for someone to steal something off your desk and then claim the work as their own.

Try to choose people that you know when you have to work in a team. It will make your life way easier as people who trust you are much less likely to steal your work. Also, make sure that someone in the room is documenting ideas and who came up with them for further recognition later. Although this may sound selfish, it will be way too easy for the project manager to claim all the credit after the fact when you have no proof to back up the claim that you saved the company millions of dollars. The project manager could get a promotion and you could get fired because the project has completed.

To protect yourself from plagiarism you need to take the initiative. Do not trust that other people are going to respect your unique work because that is just not the way other people work.

The author has had her work stolen before and she nearly got kicked out of college because of a team mate that plagiarized.