Student Plagiarised

The three students A, B and C would be considered to have plagiarised the paragraphs from the IET Communications Engineer article. Firstly, student A certainly appears to have used the same author’s passage and wording as student B, as the structure and content of the answer is to some extent comparable.  
Both students A and B’s beginning of the paragraph, explains about “Ryanair offering the use of mobile phones on board an aircraft before the end of the year” (Poole, 2007). Again, both students’ middle of the paragraph explains about the “BGAN service” and the end of the paragraph again, very familiar with student B explains how “SMS and GPRS will be relayed through a satellite link.” (Poole, 2007)

Secondly, student B explains the same information in the paragraph as student A, although sentences have been changed slightly as an idle attempt to answer the question so that the work can be passed off as their own. This is known as paraphrasing. For example similarities can be shown in the sentences “...Ryanair plans to install a service later this year.” (Poole, 2007) compared with Student A’s answer “Ryanair will have a service before the end of the year.”   As well as “These are much cheaper and more effective than previous ones, which were based around the use of In-Flight Entertainment handsets.” (Poole, 2007) Compared with student A’s answer “Previous systems were based on the use of In-Flight Entertainment handsets and were expensive and not much used.” (Poole, 2007) again this shows how similar the two articles are.
Finally, student C has changed extracts and short sentences from another author in the paragraph, as the content is not exactly the same as student A or B although an explanation of the on-board offerings is explained in the paragraph. For example "...with an on-board picocell should make it feasible for airlines to offer in-flight mobile telephony, including SMS and GPRS services, at an acceptable data rate and cost.” (Poole, 2007)This is...