Any plagiarism will be penalized severely. The following discussion has been prepared so that no student will commit plagiarism out of ignorance. Plagiarism is the act of passing off someone else's work as your own. It sounds like simple dishonesty, and it often is. Anyone who buys, borrows, or steals a paper to turn in as his or her own work is plagiarizing.
Plagiarism can be more complicated in act and intent, however.
Paraphrasing, in which someone else's work is restated in different words, is often a useful device, but it can lead more or less unintentionally to plagiarism. It is possible to forget, somewhat on purpose, that the basic work belongs to someone else. You might be shocked, if you looked at the original, to discover how closely you had reproduced it, but an instructor who receives such work can judge only the result. It is also easy to jot down notes and ideas from many sources and lazily forget to keep track of those sources. The resulting paper may be only a mosaic of others' words and ideas.