Independent guide: Veri-AQ is not affiliated with or endorsed by the University of South Africa (UNISA). Always follow the latest official UNISA policy, tutorial letter, myModules announcement and assessment instructions.
If you study through UNISA, "don't plagiarise" is easy to agree with and surprisingly easy to get wrong in practice. UNISA's rules on plagiarism, source acknowledgement and generative AI use are set out across several official documents — a standalone policy, a student disciplinary code, and assessment-specific rules that are updated for every exam sitting. This guide pulls the practical points together in plain English, so you know what to check before you submit an assignment, portfolio task or exam response.
UNISA's Policy for Copyright Infringement and Plagiarism defines plagiarism as appropriating someone else's work without proper acknowledgement — whether it was intentional or not — and expects your submitted academic work to be the result of your own skill and labour. Practices the policy treats as infringement or plagiarism include:
The important detail for students: the policy does not require intent to prove plagiarism. Work that unintentionally reproduces someone else's wording or ideas without acknowledgement can still fall foul of the policy — which is exactly why a pre-submission reference and citation check matters, even when you know you didn't mean to copy anything.
UNISA's policy isn't limited to copy-pasted text. Copying another student's assignment, buying an essay from a ghost-writing or "assignment help" service, or asking someone else to complete work on your behalf all fall under the same policy — and a low similarity-checker score on that work would not make any of those practices acceptable. A similarity percentage measures matched text; it says nothing about who actually wrote the submission.
UNISA's current online examination rules state that plagiarism, copying from published work, or using AI software such as ChatGPT or online sources such as course material — unless explicitly permitted — may violate the Policy on Academic Integrity and the Student Disciplinary Code. In practice, that means there is no single UNISA-wide "AI is fine" or "AI is banned" answer. The assessment instructions for that specific module and that specific task decide whether AI assistance is permitted, limited, or must be disclosed.
Don't assume that using AI for grammar correction, paraphrasing, or generating draft answers is allowed simply because the tool exists and is widely used — check the module-specific rule in your tutorial letter or myModules announcement before you rely on it for a graded submission.
UNISA uses Turnitin in selected assessments and in postgraduate research workflows. Current guidance indicates individual modules will state where Turnitin or other proctoring and invigilation tools apply, and where required, you may need to submit typed text and accept the relevant licence terms. For Master's and Doctoral research specifically, UNISA requires Turnitin originality checking as part of its specified research-submission process through the College of Graduate Studies — postgraduate students should follow that college's own instructions and FAQ documents rather than assuming the undergraduate process applies.
UNISA may apply institution-specific expectations for particular assessments, but Turnitin itself does not set one acceptable similarity percentage that applies to every assignment, every discipline and every task type. A similarity score has to be interpreted by actually looking at what was matched and why — not by treating the number alone as a verdict. Don't rewrite legitimate, properly cited academic content just to chase an arbitrary percentage down; that can sometimes make a submission worse, not better, if it strips out proper quotation and citation in the process.
Before you submit a UNISA assignment, portfolio item or exam response:
If you receive a notice raising a concern: read it carefully and identify exactly which policy or rule is said to have been breached; preserve your drafts, notes and any other evidence of your own authorship; if the matter is referred to a formal process, consult the Student Disciplinary Code and the published guidelines for a student disciplinary hearing on UNISA's own student-policy pages; and respond within the stated deadline, through the official channel UNISA specifies — not informally over email or a module forum.
A pre-submission review that covers requirements coverage, reference accuracy, source validity and writing consistency — alongside similarity and AI-indicator checks — gives you a far more complete picture than any single percentage. Check My UNISA Assignment Before Submission walks through exactly that kind of review before you hand work in, using Veri-AQ's Academic Quality Checker.
There's no single blanket answer that covers every assessment. UNISA's current rules prohibit AI use unless it's explicitly permitted for that specific task, so always follow the module- and assessment-specific instructions in your tutorial letter or myModules announcements.
Yes — in selected assessments, and as a required step in postgraduate (Master's and Doctoral) research-submission processes through the College of Graduate Studies.
Yes. UNISA's policy defines plagiarism broadly enough to include appropriating someone else's work without acknowledgement whether or not it was intentional — which is why checking your citations and paraphrasing carefully matters even when you're confident you didn't mean to copy anything.
No. Changing the wording of someone else's idea doesn't remove the need to acknowledge where that idea came from — paraphrasing without a citation is still treated as plagiarism under UNISA's policy.