Evaluating Students’ Plagiarism in Higher Education Institutions

Abstract

Plagiarism is a threat to students' empowerment in higher education in a knowledge economy. In this paper the phenomenon of students' plagiarism in higher education institutions and how it disempowers the advancement of global knowledge by students, are discussed. The paper begins with a description of the meaning, forms and reasons for plagiarism among students. It goes further to discuss some strategies for evaluating and detecting plagiarism in students' works using Information technology. Finally some knowledge empowerment strategies are presented to show how lecturers could tackle plagiarism by empowering students to be genuine in receiving and producing information for constructing new knowledge.

Why do postgraduate students commit plagiarism? An empirical study

“…These findings mirror what has been reported in other countries by prior studies (Leask 2006;Trost 2009;Agu and Olibie 2009;Vasconcelos et al 2009;De Jager and Brown 2010;Ellery 2008;Batane 2010;Zafaghandi et al 2012;Mahmood et al 2011) which equally found that the common forms of plagiarism committed by students include "copy and paste" without quotes and acknowledging the source; providing incomplete information about the original source; fabricating references; buying already written papers; copying from a friend or submitting work done by a friend; patch-writing; and presenting or citing the secondary source as a primary source.…”

“…Zafarghandi et al (2012) found that the common forms of plagiarism committed by students included paraphrasing without acknowledging sources, omitting quotation marks in directs quotes, patch-writing, and presenting secondary citation as if the original source had been consulted. Similar forms of plagiarism have also been reported in other studies (De Jager and Brown 2010;Leask 2006;Agu and Olibie 2009;Ryan et al 2009;Trost 2009). The study by Zafaghandi et al (2012) further revealed that the least prevalent forms of plagiarism among Masters' students in Iranian Universities included ghost writing and purloining.…”

“…In Africa, there are also a number of studies that have reported on the existence of plagiarism in institutions of higher learning. For instance, in South Africa (De Jager and Brown 2010;Ellery 2008), in Nigeria (Nordling 2018Agu and Olibie 2009), and in Botswana (Batane 2010).…”

Knowledge of library and information science undergraduates on plagiarism in federal universities in South-East Nigeria

“…From their first year in school, they should be educated on the general concept of plagiarism and this continues to go deeper as they progress to other levels till their final year. Agu et al (2009) noted that Internet technology advancements have made students" plagiarism more prevalent and this is a barrier to knowledge empowerment. Sarlauskiene and Stabingis (2014) maintained that plagiarism is a phenomenon that is as old as writing itself, and not a consequence of the development of information technology.…”

Conceptual Review of Literature on Student Plagiarism: Focusing on Nigerian Higher Education Institutions

“…Findings from studies carried out by several researchers (Agu et al, 2009;Orim, 2011;Orim, 2014;Ibegbulam & Eze, 2015;Olutola, 2016) in Nigerian Higher Institutions of learning suggest that there are occurrences of student plagiarism. As reviewed in several other sources earlier, this finding is not peculiar to the Nigerian Higher Institutions of Learning.…”