Know what counts as plagiarism in a project report

Plagiarism is presenting someone else's work as your own. In a final year project report it includes:

• Copying text, even a few sentences, without quotation marks and a citation.
• Paraphrasing closely, changing a few words but keeping the structure, without credit.
• Using figures, tables, diagrams or code from others without credit.
• Reusing a previous team's report, or parts of it.
• Submitting text written by someone else, including paid writers.
• Reusing your own earlier work, such as a course report, without citing it.

It does not include common knowledge, standard definitions and formulas, or properly quoted and cited material. India's UGC regulations of 2018, for example, exclude quoted work with attribution, references, generic terms, laws and standard equations from similarity checks.