LBB 1042

ACADEMIC WRITING RESEARCH PAPER

The Art of Using Other’s Words in University: How Big is it a Problem Here?

Name ID E-mail

Lee Yin Yin 14275 yinyin.tokidoki@gmail.com

Ong Kar Ying 14330 kaying.carryn@gmail.com

Kee Ca Ssy 14452 cassykee@gmail.com

Lecturer : Miss Gail Sylvia Steele

I. Abstract

This paper explores the reasons why students commit plagiarism. Plagiarism is defined

as copying directly from a source without giving due citation and acknowledgement

towards the real authors. Plagiarism has always been a pressing issue due to the

increasing amount of students who commit plagiarism. However, attention has also been

given to the prevalence and ease of using electronic media which may lead to

inadvertent plagiarism (Pennycook, 1996; Ellery 2008). For this study both quantitative

and qualitative methods were used whereby the qualitative method was conducting an

interview-type survey with lecturers and the quantitative method was a questionnaire

among students. We conducted a survey with 5 lecturers from the Management and

Humanities Department at UTP in addition to 74 students from different courses and

year of study. It was discovered that most students claim they have a clear

understanding on the issue of plagiarism while lecturers agree that plagiarism is a

serious problem in UTP and needs to be solved immediately. The results obtained were

both surprising and expected as we did not anticipate students would understand the

basic concept of plagiarism unlike previous research conducted. However, we expected

most of the lecturers to agree that plagiarism was a dire problem in UTP. Further

research is suggested of a qualitative nature, for example using Turnitin plagiarism

detection technology to analyse students' work and further inteviews with more lecturers.

Table of Contents

Abstract--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I

Table of contents ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1

1.0 Introduction ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2.0 Literature Review --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

3.0 Methodology --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

3.1 Settings and Participants

3.2 Materials

3.3 Procedure

4.0 Results ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

4. 1 Results of Survey (Quatitative)

4. 2 Results of Survey (Qualitative)

5.0 Discussion -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

6.0 Conclusion -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Reference list ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Appendix 1 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Appendix 2 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 Introduction

According to the Collins Dictionary of the English Language (Dawson, 2004)

plagiarism is the action of using an idea or concept from another written work by another

author. Generally speaking, plagiarism involves literary theft, stealing the words or ideas

of someone else and passing them off as one’s own without crediting the source.

At university level, the term plagiarism is commonly known among the students even

among students of University Technology Petronas. However, students might

misunderstand the real meaning of plagiarism as there are different concepts advanced

by scholars which centre on whether the action was done intentionally or not.

The occurrence of plagiarism largely depends on the standard set by the academic

setting and to what degree plagiarism is totally allowed or clearly accepted in the

academic community in society. There are various perspectives towards plagiarism

among society. Plagiarism among students for coursework assignments may be

considered a misunderstanding and can be said to be of lower severity than cheating

during examinations.( Dawson, 2004 ; Devlin & Gray, 2007).

Rules and regulation should be taken not only towards students but to all members of

the academic and scientific community to deter them from dishonest behavior. Many

cases of plagiarism are committed due to the lack of knowledge of referencing

conventions or the shortage of penalties imposed for such behaviour. Therefore, the

best approach to prevent plagiarism is to educate students and point out the importance

of trustworthiness in science and professional work (Devlin & Gray, 2007 )

This research will be conducted in a qualitative and quantitative manner.

Interview type survey will be done among lecturers in University Technology Petronas to

gain their insight into plagiarism. Furthermore, quantitative research will be conducted

among students from all courses and programmes to identify the problem to this

pressing issue.

As a whole, students should be well-acquainted with different breaches of

scientific and academic integrity, especially plagiarism, through examples from the

history of science and their awareness should be raised regarding the unacceptability of

such behaviour.

2 Literature Review

This research explores the complexity of the notion of plagiarism from socio-

cultural and psychological perspectives. Plagiarism is a dynamic and multi-layered

phenomenon and needs to be understood in relation to a specific context of academic

conventions and environment. (Dawson, 2004 ; Devlin & Gray, 2007)The amount of

students who commit plagiarism has increase tremendously throughout the years and it

is speculated that this number has increased with the advent of electronic media. Thus, it

has drove us to investigate further on reasons why students plagiarize. Plagiarism has

become a severe problem especially in Australasia.

Many research studies have been carried out using a wide range of

methodologies to get a clearer picture on this pressing academic issue. Qualitative

methods have been mostly used especially interviews and focus groups. Devlin and

Gray from the University of Melbourne conducted a one hour focus group to find out

about the many reasons for plagiarizing among students of different institutions and

gave solutions towards the problem. The research, which was conducted in 2003,

included fifty-six participants from the researcher’s university who were selected

randomly using the school electronic system to participate in the focus group.

Participants were then divided into eight school based groups which differed in the

number of pupils ranging from one pupil to a maximum of eleven participants. Students

were assured of discretion during their involvement in the focus group. During the focus

group, students were given a topic which clearly stated the purpose and nature of

research. After the focus group was over, interviewees were rewarded with a university

bookshop voucher worth twenty Australian Dollar as a token of appreciation for their time

and ideas. However, we felt that students may be dishonest when answering the

interview despite the assurances of confidentiality. It is also questionable how many of

them responded as a result of the financial incentive. Even in UTP as well, most

students are money - minded and may take part in the research as they feel it will bring

them monetary benefits.

A quantitative method was used in Scanlon and Neumann’s (2007) research

paper. In order to obtain a more accurate result, a grand total of six hundred and ninety-

eight respondents were selected from nine different colleges and universities with each

pursuing different courses to participate in his survey. Out of the six hundred and ninety-

eight respondents, the majority of them were between the age of seventeen and twenty-

three which consisted of students in their first year and above. The survey was

conducted quite a long time ago i.e. 1999 and 2000 winter and spring academic year.

The survey composed of sixty items in total whereby twenty eight questions were related

to plagiarism and electronic devices especially the world wide web whereas the

remaining queries were concerned about the student’s manner towards computer and

online communication. Before the survey was carried out, the pencil and paper survey

was first distributed among the students in the researcher’s own university. Then

students from nine additional institutions were asked to rate how frequently they commit

plagiarism using closed-ended questions with a five-point Likert- scale. This quantitative

study was then machine-scored. However, we found that there are some disadvantages

in Likert-type scales which may be inaccurate as students may be unable to distinguish

the frequency in ranks 1 to 5. Students studying in UTP were unable to give a specific

opinion on a certain issue as Likert- scales are very subjective and each person may

understand the question in a different way.

According to Dawson , 'plagiarism' derives from the Latin plagiarius, meaning

'kidnapper'; in other words the plagiarist is “the kidnapper of others' ideas, writings, and

inventions”. He is taking the stance that plagiarism is clearly a criminal act. Dawson

conducted a twenty minute discussion which consisted of a total of ninety students from

three StudyPlus groups regarding the factor of plagiarism. Fifty seven of them were

international students, including five postgraduate coursework students whereby the

remaining were local.

Meanwhile, Ellery from South Africa used both qualitative and quantitative

methodologies to obtain a more detailed result on the impact of internet access towards

a student’s writing and the rate of plagiarism. Her qualitative analysis was based on her

academic writing classes in which she educated students on referencing and in-text

citations. Strict warnings and sanctions were given to alarm students who attempted

plagiarism but a second chance would be offered. She gave in-depth personal

consultations for those who were caught plagiarizing, before the essay was returned to

be re-written. Throughout the semester, a hundred and ten participants were involved in

the entire study. She also carried out a quantitative study by giving out Survey

questionnaires to be filled in, and 151 papers were collected. In this survey, 27 percent

of the respondent had studied in Ex-DET schools, 61 percent of them from government

schools, 8 percent of them from private schools and 4 percent of them had studied

outside South Africa. Similar punishments and warnings were given to students in UTP

to frighten them from plagiarising.

From the 5 research papers we studied, it is found that there are some

similarities in the motive why plagiarism is carried out by students. The reason why

students commit this crime is partly is due to their poor understanding of plagiarism ,

which also means misunderstanding and ignorance about why and how they should

avoid plagiarism; a genuine lack of academic writing and referencing skills such as

critical analysis and paraphrasing (Dawson; Devlin & Gray ; Pennycook,1996) which

then leads them to unintentional plagiarism. Most of the students in UTP should not be

facing a problem like this as they have been given proper education on the methods to

do citations and reference list in their Academic Writing course. In some cases, students

are unable to do the referencing for certain sources using an in-text format, particularly

electronic sources rather than printed sources. This was either due to lack of information

regarding authorship and ownership given , or , the student was unable to cite an

electronic media source despite much practice and tutoring on the technicalities of

referencing. In some instances the student is simply unaware of the necessity to

recognize such sources.(Ellery, 2008)

Moreover, there are problems regarding language deficiency which affects the

student’s ability to paraphrase source material e.g. lack of vocabulary. This has been

noticed especially in Australia. As one of the most popular destinations for Asian

students in higher education, the use of formal, academic English may be a dilemma to

the some Asian students. Thus, the combination of language deficiency; failure to

rephrase adequately, and incapability to produce an essay of good quality implies

plagiarism happens more frequently in Australia.(Dawson; Devlin & Gray) Even in UTP,

quite a number of students find it difficult to paraphrase a piece of work, thus most of

them are forced to plagiarise.

However , aside from language deficiency, it is found that the definition of

plagiarizing may differ slightly according to cultural background, which can be seen more

clearly from the comparison between the eastern and western perspective. In

Pennycook’s research paper, written about his teaching tenure at the University of Hong

Kong, a number of challenging issues were raised by his students. Most notably, he

discovered that there are students who were unsure about textual-borrowing and in fact

he was also unsure. He realized that the east Asian education, particularly for Chinese,

is largely memorization-based. It is because the Chinese believe that memorization

through repetition can deepen and develop understanding more. Their children are

required to learn various types of writing of rote and then are expected to use it

flawlessly in their own piece of work, while the authorization or ownership of that text is

of lesser concern. By contrast, the West has developed the notion of textual ownership,

which means paying additional attention to the authorship and requiring the writer to

acknowledge the original author using citation.(Pennycook)

Some students were unable to produce an academic essay because they

considered the topics given difficult to understand compared to high school writing

(Dawson & Pennycook). In high school, the focus of the syllabus was exam-based with

no books allowed in examination hall, therefore memorizing texts and facts was the only

way to achieve success. To conclude this point of view, we can say that one of the

reasons for a student to commit plagiarism is that they are unable to overcome the

transition from secondary school writing to a more academic university way of writing.

In some cases, students were unable to grasp academic writing skills due to the

low quality of lecturers e.g. low teaching skills, unable to communicate with students

well.( Dawson; Devlin and Gray; Pennycook) However, the student can also be guilty as

some of them possess passive attitudes e.g. laziness, dishonesty, lack of initiative to

overcome their own setback. Yet, there were some cases whereby some lecturers were

too extreme in pursuing a student plagiarizer and felt thrilled with that, making this issue

became more emotional-based. (Pennycook) Students here at UTP may be driven to

commit plagiarism due to the immense workload given by lecturers. With forth coming

tests and a pile of assignments, UTP students may choose to take the easy way out by

copying other people's work. Thus, we have decided to include a request of the lecturers'

and students' opinion on plagiarizing in our methodology to make our research paper

more reliable as this issue involves both lecturers and students.

3 Methodology

3.1 Settings and Participants

The questionnaire with relevant constructed questions will be distributed to 74 students

studying in University Technology Petronas, with distribution among students studying in

the Foundation programme until Post graduate programmes. The students would

comprise of students from all courses without a regarding of gender. Surveys were

conducted among lecturers in UTP. 5 lecturers from the Management and Humanities

Department.

3.2 Materials

This study utilizes both the quantitative and qualitative method which are questionnaires

among students and survey among lectures. As such, the structuring of the

questionnaires would be based on the hypothesis obtained from the researches. The

main aim of this particular research design is to prove that all the factors mentioned

holds truth and is the triggering effect of plagiarism.

3.3 Procedure

Data collection was done by handing out questionnaires to students regardless of

race, gender and course. Before the subjects begin doing the questionnaires, they were

given the assurance that their identity would be kept confidential and the information

obtained from the forms would only be solely used for tabulation of results purposes and

not be exposed to third parties for other reasons other than this research. The subjects

are also advised to complete the forms with utmost honesty. The participants are

required to only give their opinion on the question asked based on a 5-point Likert scale

ranging from whether the students strongly agree or strongly disagree with the question.

Once the data collection has been done, the number of agreement or disagreements for

each question would be tallied and then inserted into a table. Graphical representations

in the form of bar charts would be used to depict the students understanding of

plagiarism.

4 Results

4.1 Results for Questionnaire (Quantitative)

This section provides the results of a quantitative survey conducted with 70

undergraduate and postgraduate students at UTP.

Figure 1 below presents the results of questions asked to check students’ understanding

of plagiarism.

1. Someti

mes I fe

el tem

pted

to plagiar

ize beca

use so

man

y

other stu

dents

are doing i

t.

5. Plag

iarism

is justi

fied if

the pro

fesso

r

assig

ns too m

uch w

ork for t

he course

.

7. If a

studen

t buys

or download

s free

a whole

resea

rch pap

er an

d turn

s it in

unchan

ged as

his / her

work, th

e

studen

t should be e

xpell

ed.

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

Strongly Agree

Agree

Neutral

Disagree

Strongly disagree

Figure 1 : Students’ comprehension of plagiarism

Table 1 below the results of questions to explain why students plagiarise.

Table 1: Explanations for plagiarism among students

Statement Strongly

agree

Agree Neutral Strongly

disagree

Disagree

4. If my roommate gives me

permission to use his or her paper for

one of my classes, I don't consider I

am doing anything wrong.

11 23 19 12 5

5. Plagiarism is justified if the

professor assigns too much work for

the course.

3 24 24 18 2

7. If a student buys or downloads free

a whole research paper and turns it in

unchanged as his / her work, the

student should be expelled.

25 13 22 5 5

Figure 2 show the results of questions to determine whether adequate punishment

should be given to those who plagiarise.

Strongly AgreeAgreeNeutralDisagreeStronglyDisagree

Figure 2: Question 12: If a student is caught plagiarizing he / she .Should have

their transcript marked e.g. FP – Fail for Plagiarizing as this would deter

plagiarism

4. 2 Results of Survey (Qualitative)

This section provides the results of a quantitative survey conducted among 5 lecturers at

UTP. Firstly, the lecturers from the Management and Humanities department were asked

for their definition of plagiarism and four wrote that it was copying other author's work

without giving due citations or acknowledgement, however while one adamantly

described it as "theft" of other's work. That lecturer further claimed it to be a serious

offence according to the criminal law and the plagiariser do not deserve to remain in

university. All lecturers interviewed agreed whole-heartedly that plagiarism is a serious

problem in UTP. There are many types of plagiarism according to them. Students

plagiarise from electronic media mainly the internet as well as articles, journals and

research papers from others. Some students even resort to copying their colleagues

work. All lecturers came out with ideas of their own regarding how to solve this problem.

They suggested more training & practice on citation during academic writing lectures and

constantly giving reminders to students on ownership and plagiarism. Lecturers believe

that severe academic punishments, like academic dismissal and failure for the particular

course would be a good enough deterrence factor.

5 Discussion

The aim of this discussion is to objectively analyze the results to gain a better

understanding of why students commit plagiarism and the possible reasons behind it.

Surveys and interviews were conducted with students and staff at UTP to gain a better

view on this subject. Major questions that were asked in this research were: the reason

behind plagiarism; whether students understand the real meaning of plagiarism and

whether the penalties were too severe.

Based on a survey conducted among 74 UTP students, it was discovered that

most claim to understand the meaning of plagiarism and its basic constituents. In Devlin

and Gray's (2007) study, one of the factors leading to plagiarism was lack of knowledge

regarding the concept of plagiarism. From this study it was shown that students in this

university has been clearly taught by their lecturers regarding this severe issue and 38

out of 74 students agreed that plagiarism was simply copying other author's work. The

number of students who did not understand the concept of plagiarism was surprising as

we did not expect any students to be unclear about it. Students in UTP compulsorily

attend an Academic Writing course which teaches students the concept of plagiarism

and the accurate techniques to paraphrase and cite a paper. It is therefore suggested

that the 18 students may be from foundation studies as they were not exposed to

Academic Writing yet.

Further reasons that leads to plagiarism, given by students, are the huge

workload given by the lecturer as well as a temptation to plagiarise because others

commit the same crime. 24 students claimed that plagiarism is justified when there is too

much work being assigned and another 24 agreed that they were tempted to plagiarise

when others do it. Research has shown that laziness or convenience may be the core of

the problem ( who wrote this? You need a citation) while none touched on the issue of

temptation. Laziness can be said to be a problem affecting students in every university.

With the increasing amount of homework, quizzes and tests, students may seem to have

no choice but to resort to cheating by plagiarising.

Temptation is only a recently discovered issue but it is a relevant one. Students

may be influenced by their peers to commit plagiarism as they have the mindset of

following others. Moreover, we see a lack of awareness among students when they

actually commit plagiarism. Laziness and temptation may be bad, but when it comes

down to cheating, nothing is worse. Some students plagiarise because they could not be

bothered to do their work. Nevertheless, we cannot stereotype all students into cheaters.

Some students may have acquired a good sentence or idea from a research paper but

they forget to paraphrase it and submit as his or her own piece of work.

On the whole, students mainly understood the severity of plagiarism and they

realised the many definitions of it. For example, 25 students strongly agreed that student

taking another author's paper and submitting it as one’s own is enough to lead to

expulsion of the student, while 33 students agreed that the punishment should be on par

with the offense committed. Past research does not appear to explain this issue, but this

finding clearly suggests UTP students find it a serious problem that needs to be tackled

effectively. For question 12, students were asked whether a student should have their

transcript marked FP – Fail for Plagiarizing for those who commit plagiarism as a

preclusion factor. Although most of the students agreed to this idea, we see the amount

of students who have no stand or disagree with this issue exceeds those who agree. It

can be said that students choose not to be punished as there may be a few that are

actually involved in this problem. When students were asked whether copying less than

a paragraph of work deserves a lighter punishment, even with the large number of

affirmative answers received, we still see plagiarism as a very subjective issue as every

author or lecturer has different opinions and definitions on it.

During the qualitative research, five lecturers were asked to give their opinion on

this matter. Lecturers define plagiarism as the act of a copying, with one defining it as

theft, which means stealing another’s idea by direct lifting the others’ work without any

acknowledgement. According to them, plagiarism covers copying from electronic

media, mainly from the internet, articles, journals, research paper without any citation or

acknowledge to the author and copying their colleague’s work. All the lecturers agreed

that this is a serious problem and needs to be solved through many measures such as:

more training and practice on citing and referencing during academic writing tutorials;

constant reminders to create awareness among students of ownership; and severe

academic punishments e.g. academic dismissal or failure in a particular course. Through

this research, it was discovered that many lecturers want this problem to be solved as

soon as possible as they want stringent laws to be passed. From the research

conducted by Pennycook (1996) and Scanlon and Neumann (2007), both of these

researchers agreed on the importance of imposing sanctions and severe actions to be

taken to those who plagiarise intentionally.

UTP is considered an Islamic University as the majority of the students here are

Muslims. The university tries to instill the virtues of honesty and purity through course

units in Ethical behavior and Islamic studies therefore intentional copying and plagiarism

should not be tolerated. It is shocking to see that some students are actually brazen

enough to commit these crimes.

With the completion of the study, we realised this study contains some flaws and

limitations in the methodology section as the number of participants was only small i.e.

74, which is hardly enough to draw strong and credible conclusions. However, this study

can only serve as a platform to roughly estimate and determine the truthfulness of the

hypothesis. On the other hand, time is also a limitation as the time allocation for the

completion of this study was only 7 weeks. Furthermore we were unable to get the view

of lecturers from other departments. Lecturers have their own time constraints, thus they

were unable to effectively answer the survey.

Plagiarism has been a pressing issue for a long time and will probably continue

to be a problem. It appears to be the case that one of the major reasons why students

plagiarise is because they do not have the knowledge of what is considered plagiarism.

However, findings here have shown that students clearly understood the issues behind

plagiarism as lecturers must have clarified this topic with them. Temptation and

convenience was determined to be the main source of plagiarism as many agreed that it

was not against their principle for doing it. Both lecturers and students agree that strict

actions, such as academic expulsion should be taken towards students that commit this

heinous crime and they agreed that more teaching should be done to further increase

the students’ awareness on this matter.

6 Conclusion

The purpose of this research paper was to understand and discover to what

extent plagiarism poses as a severe problem in University Technology Petronas (UTP).

Plagiarism has always been a problem thus a lot of past research has been conducted.

From our research paper, we narrowed down plagiarism into three different questions:

do students really understand the meaning of plagiarism ; what is the real reason behind

plagiarism and is the punishment too severe? In UTP, most students agreed that they

understood the constituents of plagiarism. More than half of the students agreed to this

statement. From the questionnaire, it was understood that students commit plagiarism

due to laziness and convenience therefore students have the clear intention of cheating.

As the idea of plagiarism is very subjective, most students agreed that different levels of

plagiarism require different punishment of different severity. The problem of plagiarism

needs to be handled effectively and immediately before the situation worsens. With the

completion of this study, it is hoped that students would be better acquainted with

different breaches of scientific and academic integrity. It is hoped that the awareness

level of the Malaysian public can be increased and further research could be done to so

that in the near future this is issue would not be a troublesome problem for every

university.

Reference List

Devlin, M. & Gray, K. (2007). In their own words: A qualitative study of the reasonsAustralian university student plagiarise. Higher Education Research and Development,

26(2), 181-198.

Scanlon,P,M. & Neumann,D,R. (2002) Internet Plagiarism Among College Students.

Journal of College Student Development , 43(3) ,374-385.

Pennycook, A.(1996) . Borrowing Other’s Words : Text, Ownership, Memory, and

Plagiarism. Tesol Quaterly, 30(2), 201-230.

Dawson, J. (2004). Plagiarism: What's really going on? . Proceedings of the 13th Annual

Teaching Learning Forum. Retrieved February 9-10 2004.

http://lsn.curtin.edu.au/tlf/tlf2004/dawson.html

Dawson, J. (2004). Plagiarism: What's really going on? In Seeking Educational

Excellence. Proceedings of the 13th Annual Teaching Learning Forum, 9-10 February

2004. Perth: Murdoch University. http://lsn.curtin.edu.au/tlf/tlf2004/dawson.html

**(this one is given on da research paper de, I duno shud use tis or not, cos its diff frm

wat we do, bt den, it stated there “please cite this ” at the bottom part)

***Ellery de research paper I dun hav, so dim do da reference

** checked all da in-text citation alrdy

Appendix