It was "plagiarized or consisted of primarily quoted material"
Posts that violate Packback’s Community Guidelines are flagged by our moderation algorithm and submitted for manual review by community moderators. One of the reasons a question or response may be moderated is for internal plagiarism and external plagiarism.
What is Internal Plagiarism?
Our plagiarism detector looks for text matching not only outside sources but posts that already exist in your current or previous communities! If your post was identical (or at least 50% matching) to a Packback post that you or another student made in a Packback community, it will be flagged and potentially moderated for plagiarism.
Why do we moderate for Internal Plagiarism?
Though they may be your own words, we encourage students to avoid duplicating previous posts. Ideally, your new thoughts should be able to stand alone from anything you or another student have posted before. Your quoted text should not outweigh the amount of new or additional thought in your post!
What is External Plagiarism?
External Plagiarism is using others' ideas and words without clearly acknowledging the source of that information.
Note: Remember that we still moderate a post even if you’ve included quotation marks! Copy-and-pasting doesn’t effectively demonstrate curiosity as much as exploring the content. Ideally, your thoughts should be able to stand alone without the addition of citations (which are used to support your post).
Why do we moderate for External Plagiarism?
Though you may have quoted the material we encourage students to not incorporate primarily quoted material in their posts. These types of posts don’t fully demonstrate the depth of the material you’re learning because the thoughts being posted don’t highlight your own curiosity which could lead to a higher quality discussion! Ideally, your new thoughts should be able to stand alone from anything you’ve quoted from your source. Your quoted text should not outweigh the amount of new or additional thought in your post!
Why was your post moderated External Plagiarism?
We believe material taken from online sources should supplement your learning and not overpower your unique ideas! Your question and/or response was moderated because our AI or a member of your community flagged your post for being "plagiarized or consisted of primarily quoted material", which falls outside of the Packback Community Guidelines. The "flag" was then reviewed by our team of moderators."
Helpful Tips to Avoid Plagiarism
- If your post was a duplicate meant to replace an old one, make sure to delete the original post before republishing the new one.
- Avoid directly quoting another classmate's post
- If you are directly quoting another post, make sure that more than half of your post contains original ideas not found there.
- If you are directly quoting from a source, make sure that more than half of your post contains original ideas not found there.
- If your posted question has a reply, you will no longer be able to edit your question. Instead of reposting your question with the edit, just reach out to help@packback.co for assistance in editing.
How to edit and republish a post
In order to earn back the points for your post, we recommend exploring which of your own thoughts you can bring to your question/and or response. If you'd like more tips for how to do that, feel free to check out our blog post that lays out a few helpful tips for editing and republishing moderated posts: How do I edit and republish my post?
What happens after I edit and republish a post
After you edit a post to apply the feedback from the moderation email and republish, your post will be published with its original posting date. As long as you republish before our instructor pulls grades for that deadline period, you will receive full credit for your post. Republished posts are still checked by our AI and moderators, so please be sure that your post meets the Community Guidelines when republishing so it is not flagged or moderated again.