What Fred goes through in the video is a real nightmare, but contrary to what you might think, the situation isn’t all that far-fetched. As a student, you should know the rules that govern your academic work.

At the University of Geneva, students are subject to the Directive on Student Plagiarism. These are its key elements:

“Plagiarism is defined as inserting in one's academic work formulations, phrases, passages, images or whole chapters, as well as ideas or analyses, taken from the work of other authors or produced using a generative artificial intelligence tool, and passing them off as one's own. Plagiarism is committed by the author of the work either by actively appropriating the aforementioned elements or by omitting the correct reference, whether intentionally or not. ”

“Master’s and bachelor’s theses and other research work will […] be checked in all cases of suspected plagiarism and also by random sampling”.

You should be aware that the University is taking more and more measures to assist teachers in detecting plagiarism. A module of the plagiarism detection software used by UNIGE, Compilatio, is incorporated into Moodle to allow instructors to immediately analyze texts submitted by their students.

Refer to the Directive as often as you need to. Ignorance of it is no excuse!