Only by twisting the meaning of plagiarism to be defined as word-for-word.
Universities intensively train students to accept plagiarism so long as the copy is sufficiently reworded (and hopefully referenced). That sick and pointless system is ironically being exposed by student usage of LLMs.
Not sure what kind of university you went to but at mine it was always about ideas. If you get an idea from somewhere else, you had to cite the original work, no matter how much you rewrote it. It's not just direct quotes that need to be cited.
That of course doesn't mean that every instance of plagiarism is actually detected but the principles are there.
Perhaps paraphrasing is specific to New Zealand? Students are very strongly encouraged here to rewrite everything into "their own words" and they are penalised if they don't (plagiarism detection software has been used for years to detect sentences that were not paraphrased by students).
Direct quotes from other sources should only be used when absolutely necessary. It is best to paraphrase the quote or summarise the ideas when you use other people’s writing.
in your assignment, you need to ensure that there is enough difference in form between the original [words] and your own summarised version. This may be achieved by simplifying the ideas, as well as using a different sentence structure or sentence order to present those ideas.
Students are forced to do it here in NZ. I find it dishonest and pointless. Although generally I'm rather cynical about the value of university education here.
Searching for "paraphrase" comes up with other suggestions which demonstrate that students are searching for tools to do it for them. That isn't a recent development with LLMs.
That's a different issue though and has little to do with plagiarism. Based on skimming those links it doesn't seem that they absolve the student from plagiarism just because they sufficiently reshuffled the words (though again, it makes it harder to detect).
If it's cited, it's usually by definition not plagiarism. Omitting the reference is passing the work off as your own, but providing that information is giving credit to where it is due.
That can vary. A fair number of institutions would consider an undergrad paper that consisted mostly of cited quotations, with only a small amount of original analysis and conclusion drawing to be a form of plagiarism, even while a similar paper that paraphrases many of the cited works might be more acceptable, especially if the paraphrasing was adding value, like standardizing equivalent terminology between the sources (ideally including footnotes about what each author originally called each concept).
Other institutions do hold more of a view that plagiarism is not possible with credit, but they will then consider the first mentioned paper as some other form of academic violation.
Even the narrow definition institutions don't view plagiarism purely as misrepresenting sources of ideas as yourself, or self-plagiarism would not be a thing. It ends up as something more like: passing off original ideas from another work as having originated in this current work.
The main issue is that students don't have original ideas, at least not way into their master's project.
This means that every single thing they write throughout their studies is some regurgitation of stuff they find elsewhere.
To avoid having a reference after every single sentence, we need to allow them to pretend that some of the stuff they read is common knowledge, and can thus be passed on as such, without reference.
But if someone else actually wrote the sentence, that would be plagiarism, hence writing it in your own words.
It is indeed worthwhile to point out that universities care less about the actual idea of taking someone else’s work, but rather more about the idea of doing so without credit. In the charitable sense, this is what science is built on. In the less charitable sense, this is what science is built on
Only by twisting the meaning of plagiarism to be defined as word-for-word.
Universities intensively train students to accept plagiarism so long as the copy is sufficiently reworded (and hopefully referenced). That sick and pointless system is ironically being exposed by student usage of LLMs.