The answer is simple: It’s both. Regardless of where you look, the definition of plagiarism clearly includes both ideas and expression. Merriam-Webster defines plagiarism as “to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own.

How to plagiarize in five easy steps (without getting caught)

1. Add adjectives and adverbs.
2. Change the order of the words a bit.
3. Choose an obscure person to plagiarize.
4. Say it with an accent.
5. If you get caught deny, deny, deny.

Citation and attribution serve different purposes. Citation is used for academic reasons in order to give credit to a colleague for their work as part of academic integrity. It’s also used for legal reasons. All of an open work may be used with no limitations; attribution is used to give the author of this work credit.

Whether deliberate or unintentional, plagiarism violates ethical standards in scholarship (see APA Ethics Code Standard 8.11, Plagiarism). To avoid plagiarism, provide appropriate credit to your sources by adding author–date in-text citations for direct quotations and ideas (e.g., credit the originators of theories).

If you intentionally commit plagiarism (for example, by copying and pasting text or paraphrasing another author’s ideas without citing the source), you will probably fail the assignment or the course, be subject to disciplinary action, and potentially be suspended.

If one simply uses the wrong citation style, an instructor may lower the grade, but wouldn’t consider it as plagiarism since the source is fully cited (just in the wrong way for that assignment). However, in situations where the citation is neither correct nor complete, it can definitely still be considered plagiarism.

There is absolutely no way one can find out if the content in a text file created using notepad is typed manually or filled using copy-paste. It is just impossible because no additional information about the content is stored anywhere about what is its source (I mean, key board strokes or a copy-paste action).

In short, they can’t tell you what people are copying and pasting on your home page nor can they help you ensure that your work is attributed.

There are a number of ways teachers can figure out if their students are plagiarizing. You type in a portion of your student’s paper and run it through a plagiarism checker to see if those words appear elsewhere on the Internet. If they do, your student may have plagiarized.

Can Blackboard tell when you copy and paste? Yes, if you paraphrase without paraphrasing and citing well, Blackboard will detect that you copy-pasted. This is mostly done through the use of SafeAssign.

What Canvas or Blackboard can Monitor during exams. It is important to note that even though online exam portals do not detect you opened new tabs, the instructor can tell that you left the page. They can see that there is no interaction going on in the page.