The easy availability of texts in digital form (especially on the Internet) has given the general public, and thus also students, the impression that everything that has been published so far is somehow in the "public domain" and therefore can be freely inserted in own works. This impression is wrong. Especially in assessed work, such as seminar papers, programming projects, term papers, licentiate and master's theses, adopted formulations, ideas and other intellectual achievements, and wherever these services were published must be meticulously documented - everything else is Plagiarism. The university has significantly tightened sanctions against students who plagiarise because of the proliferation of plagiarism.

• Remember: Whatever you google on the Internet to put it into your work, we will also find just as quickly with Google. And we do not like plagiarism. If occurrences of plagiarism are discovered in an assessed work, you will receive a grade of 1, and thus you will fail the entire course, regardless of the other grades. In such cases, you are allowed to write another master thesis right away.
• And as you're just asking, yes, you can tell very quickly that a passage is probably from somewhere else and then we go to Google, and you're caught. This also applies to cases where the plagiarists even thought to replace all "ß" with "ss" (which is not always the case).
• Last but not least: The University of Zurich has acquired a license for a fairly useful plagiarism detection program - and we are using it as well. You have been warned!

Please have a look at these leaflets about plagiarism:

Official information sheet for the University of Zurich (PDF, 167 KB) (in German)