ISSN: 2226-6348
Open access
While plagiarism is wrily said to be common among undergraduates due mainly to ignorance, the occurrence of the academic dishonour among postgraduate students is perhaps not that unheard of either, though for reasons other than lack of awareness. Considering that plagiarism is a serious academic offence, it would logically be shunned by a mature, responsible postgraduate student in preparing written work for submission. As such, it is noteworthy that plagiarism cases among postgraduate students may be attributed to a combination of reasons at both personal and institutional levels. This paper describes an in-house study of postgraduate students’ perception on plagiarism at the University, with emphasis on 2 clusters of factors, i.e. institutional demand and historical baggage. Responses from 315 postgraduate students at both master’s and PhD level were analysed and discussed. From the institutional demand perspective of workload and grading exercise, it was found that excessive workload and time-consuming field trips with little impact on the assessment were considered silent factors pushing students towards the dishonest act, while seemingly unfair assessment by the lecturers was also thought to be a trigger to plagiarism. On the other hand, students do come with historical bagagge of prior experiences, and largely regarded reporting the published work of others (without citation) as a form of respect and recognition, and that creating a patchwork of others’ efforts to be claimed as one’s own is considered acceptable. All in all, the survey results shed light on the potentially negative pull towards plagiarism caused by intrinsic values of the students as well as the University’s academic system in general, highlighting the need to realign the factors examined.
Boisvert, R. F., & Irwin, M. J. (2008). Plagiarism on the rise. Comm. in the ACM, Vol. 49, No. 6, pp. 23-24.
Chan, C. M., Shamsuddin, A., & Seman, M. A. S. (2014). Plagiarism: A review of why Malaysian students commit the academic dishonor. Proc. of the International Symposium on Technology Management and Emerging Technologies (ISTMET2014), Bandung, Indonesia.
Chan, C.-M., Rahman, I. A., & Sanudin, R. (2020). Institutional Demands vs. Historical Baggage: What do Postgraduate Students Perceive of Plagiarism? International Journal of Academic Research in Progressive Education and Development, 9(1), 39–52.
Debnath, C. J. (2016). Plagiarism: a silent epidemic in scientific writing- Reasons, recognition and remedies. Medical J. Armed Forces India, Vol. 72, pp. 164-167.
Devlin, M., & Gray, K. (2007). In their own words: A qualitative study of the reasons Australian university students plagiarize. Higher Edu. Research & Development, Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 181-198.
Ehrich, J., Howard, S. J., Mu, C., & Bokosmaty, S. (2014). A comparison of Chinese and Australian university students’ attitudes towards plagiarism. Studies in Higher Edu., Vol.41, No. 2, pp. 231-246.
Gómez, J., Salazar, I. & Vargas, P. (2013). Dishonest behaviour and plagiarism by university students: An application to management studies. Procedia Social & Behavioural Sc., Vol. 83, pp. 766-770.
Long, T. C., Errami, M., George, A. C., Sun, Z., & Garner, H. R. (2009). Responding to possible plagiarism. Science, Vol. 323, pp. 1293-1294.
Martin. (2009). Plagiarism, integrity, and workplace deviance: A criterion study. Ethics & Behaviour, Vol. 19, pp.36-50.
McCabe, D. L., Treviño, L. K. & Butterfield, T. L. (2002). Honour codes and other contextual influences on academic integrity: A replication and extension to modified honour code settings. Research in Higher Edu., Vol. 43, pp.357-378.
Moissidou, E. (2013). Practices of primary education principals in Greece: Consensus and enforcement. Multilingual Academic Journal of Education and Social Sciences, 1(2), 73–81.
Pernamasari, R. (2018). Implementation of Good Corporate Governance and Voluntary Disclosure Compliance: 100 Compass Index Companies Listed Indonesian Stock Exhange (IDX) 2015-2016, International Journal of Academic Research in Accounting, Finance and Management Sciences 8 (2): 235-249.
Sattler, S., Wiegel, C., & Venn, F. V. (2015). The use of frequency of 10 different methods for preventing and detecting academic dishonesty and the factors in influencing their use. Studies in Higher Edu., Vol. 42, No.6, pp. 1126-1144.
Schiller, M. R. (2005). E-cheating: Electronic plagiarism. J. American Dietetic Association, Vol. 105, No. 7, pp. 1058-1062.
Sisti, D. A. (2007). How do high school students justify internet plagiarism?. Ethics & Behaviour, Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 215-231.
Wang, Y. M. (2008). University online plagiarism. Int. J. on E-Learning, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp.743-757.
Zaini, M. K., Masrek, M. N., Sani, M. K. J. A., & Anwar, N. (2018). Theoretical Modeling of Information Security: Organizational Agility Model based on Integrated System Theory and Resource Based View. International Journal of Academic Research in Progressive Education and Development, 7(3), 390–400.
In-Text Citation: (Chan et al., 2020)
To Cite this Article: Chan, C.-M., Rahman, I. A., & Sanudin, R. (2020). Institutional Demands vs. Historical Baggage: What do Postgraduate Students Perceive of Plagiarism? International Journal of Academic Research in Progressive Education and Development, 9(1), 78–88.
Copyright: © 2020 The Author(s)
Published by Human Resource Management Academic Research Society (www.hrmars.com)
This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this license may be seen at: http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode