Academic Plagiarism Amongst Students: Does Educational Level Matter?

Author(s):

Bartomeu Mut-Amengual(presenting / submitting)Rubén Comas-Forgas Jaume Sureda-Negre Mercè Morey-López

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

16. ICT in Education and Training

Format:

Paper

Session Information

16 SES 04 A, The Transition to Digital Resources

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-09

09:00-10:30

Room:

3005. [Main]

Chair:

Adriana Gewerc

Contribution

Despite academic integrity and ethical values represents basic principles in the educational systems and educational institutions, there is strong evidence indicating that fraudulent and dishonest practices are prevalent in education institutions worldwide (Hallak & Poisson, 2002; Poisson, 2010). Moreover, there exists some signals that reveal an expansion in this type of behaviour and practices (Hallak & Poisson, 2007), which denotes that the problem needs to be tackled firmly and bravely.

Whenever the topic of academic integrity it is addressed, a clear distinction should be done amongst three types of practices: a) academic dishonest practices linked to the actions (or omissions) of the teachers and researchers; b) academic dishonest practices linked to the actions (or omissions) of the education administration and management staff; and c) academic dishonest practices linked to the actions (or omissions) of students (Comas, 2009). The present contribution is focused on the third of the described collectives: students enrolled in secondary, upper secondary and university levels.

Based on Comas, Sureda, Casero and Morey (2011), the academic dishonesty practices perpetrated by students includes diverse conduct and/or behaviours that undermine the principles of integrity: a) misconduct that occurs during assessment tests and assignments (e.g., copying or allowing others to copy in written tests, plagiarising papers either wholly or partially or falsification of study data) and b) behaviours that take place within the framework of interpersonal relationships related to quotidian aspects of respect and harmony in the institution life (e.g., damaging an academic institution’s materials and/or furniture, damaging colleagues’ materials and/or possessions and disrespecting colleagues and/or teaching staff).

There is a quite large amount of empirical support and literature on the topic of academic plagiarism amongst university students (Comas, 2009), but if we look at other levels of the educational systems, the result is that the situation is completely different as reflects the literature review carried out by Comas, Sureda, Angulo & Mut (2011).

In the present contribution we communicate the results of a survey carried out in Spain in which students from secondary, upper secondary and university levels participated in order to describe and analyse, firstly, the prevalence of academic plagiarism practices amongst them. Secondly, the intention of the work is to determine whether exist significant differences of academic plagiarism commission amongst the students of the different levels.

Judging from the existing evidences, it seems like prevalence rates of plagiarism in secondary education are very similar to those given in higher education, although this affirmation should be formulated with some question marks, as there is no study that has used the same instrument to measure the academic prevalence rates in the different educational levels and this is the main added value of our contribution: the same instrument was used to calibrate the academic plagiarism prevalence amongst the students of the three education levels. Following the classification elaborated by Comas (2009), the present study can be included in the studies that attempt to measure the spread and frequency of the phenomenon of academic plagiarism amongst students.

The part of the study dedicated at analysing the prevalence of academic plagiarism amongst secondary education students was part of the activities included in the project «El plagio académico entre el alumnado de ESO de Baleares» [Academic plagiarism among CSE students in the Balearic Islands] (Reference EDU2009-14019-C02-01), funded by the Directorate-General for Research of the Ministry of Science and Innovation of the Government of Spain.

Method

The study was designed and developed based on a survey, confidential and anonymous, administrated to participants. This type of survey is most often used in research focused on Academic Integrity and has been shown to provide reasonably accurate estimations (Cizek, 1999), mainly on the incidence and prevalence of the perpetration of certain behaviours (basically those that can be regarded as socially incorrect) as they provide the perspective of the subjects themselves (Hollinger & Lanza-Kaduce, 2009). The survey had three versions, so as to be adapted to the characteristics of the respondents, but the modifications amongst them were really minimal, just some necessary adaptations. The survey was based on the questionnaire constructed and validated by Comas (2009) on his Doctoral Thesis, which at the same time was based on a rigorous analysis of the literature on the topic. The sample consisted in 3520 students: 1503 enrolled in Compulsory Secondary Education (ages 12 to 16), 1291 enrolled in Upper Secondary Education (16 to 18 years) and 726 enrolled in undergraduate courses at the University. Regarding gender: 57,1% of the sample was composed by females and 42,9% were males. To measure the academic plagiarism a scale was used in which students had to respond how many times (on a scale that was: “Never”, “One or two times”, “Three to five times”, “Six to ten times” and “More than ten times”) they had committed during the academic year previous to the administration of the questionnaire some academic plagiarism actions, being: Action 1: Download a complete essay from the Internet and deliver it, without modification, as a proper essay. Action 2: Copy web snippets and without citations, paste directly the content into a document which there is a piece of text written by the student. Action 3: Delivering an essay written by another student which had already been delivered in previous years (for the same subject or another). Action 4: Copy fragments of printed sources (books, encyclopaedias, newspapers, magazine articles, etc.) and add them without citations as parts of an essay. Action 5: Elaborate and deliver a whole essay by coping and pasting content found on the Internet. Action 6: Copy parts of essays submitted in previous years by the student and deliver them as a new essay. Data analysis was performed using the statics package SPSS version 21.

Expected Outcomes

In general terms, the more prevalent plagiarism actions committed by the participants were: Action 2 (a little bit more than 80% responded that had done it in the previous academic year); Action 4 (more than 70% responded that had never done it in the previous academic year); Action 5 (less than 45% responded that had never done it in the previous academic year); Action 6 (less than 40% responded that had never done it in the previous academic year). The less prevalent actions were: Action 1 and Action 3. With the resulting data we generated (by summing the responses given by the participants in the 6 actions) an index of academic plagiarism that was established between a score of six (what means that the student had never committed none of the actions presented in the questionnaire) and thirty (what means that the student had committed the actions presented in the questionnaire more than 10 times). General results show that the general index (calculated using the mean) is: 10,6 (SD=3,5). And the index separated by level of the students shows that the students of Compulsory Secondary Education had the lowest index of academic plagiarism (10,3), meanwhile the students of Upper Secondary Education had the highest index (11,1) and University students had an index of 10,4. Differences between groups are neither relevant nor significant, which means that the academic plagiarism phenomenon is equally extended in the three educational levels studied. This is quite a worrisome conclusion as implies that students hasn’t progressed and act in the same way -regarding the commission of academic plagiarism- throughout their school and university life.

References

Cizek, G.J. (1999). Cheating on Tests: How to do it, Detect it, and Prevent it. London: Routledge. Comas, R. (2009). El ciberplagio y otras formas de deshonestidad académica entre el alumnado universitario (Unpublished Doctoral Thesis). Palma de Mallorca: University of the Balearic Islands. Comas, R., Sureda, J, Casero, A. & Morey, M. (2011). La integridad académica entre el alumnado universitario español. Estudios pedagógicos, 37(1), 207-225. Comas, R., Sureda, J., Angulo, F. & Mut, T. (2011). Academic Plagiarism amongst Secondary Education Students: State of the Art. 4th International Conference of Education, Research and Innovations Proceedings, 4314-4321. Madrid: IATED. Hallak, J. & Poisson, M. (2002). Ethics and corruption in education. Paris: UNESCO. Hallak, J. & Poisson, M. (2007). Fraude académico, acreditación y garantía de calidad: lecciones aprendidas del pasado y retos para el futuro. In: Sanyal, B. y Tres, J. (Edit.) La educación superior en el mundo 2007. Acreditación para la garantía de la calidad: ¿Qué está en juego? Madrid: Mundi-Prensa. Lanza-Kaduce, L. & Klug, M. (1986).Learning to cheat: The interaction of moral-development and social learningtheories. Deviant Behavior, 7, 243-259. Poisson, M. (2010). Corruption and education. Paris; International Institute for Educational Planning UNESCO.

Author Information

Bartomeu Mut-Amengual (presenting / submitting)

University of Balearic Islands' (UIB)

Department of Applied Pedagogy and Educational Psychology

Palma

Rubén Comas-Forgas

University of Balearic Islands' (UIB), Spain

Jaume Sureda-Negre

University of Balearic Islands' (UIB), Spain

Mercè Morey-López

University of Balearic Islands' (UIB), Spain

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