Lecturers' Perception and Attitude towards Plagiariam among Students: Implication for Higher Education
Authors: Soyemi Opeyemi , & Adebowale Ojo
Journal: Emerging Discourses On The Future Of Higher Education In Africa
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Abstract
The advent of the Internet and the consequent free access to increasingly available information resources and possibilities for students’ ‘copying and pasting’ text from online documents has raised so much concern. Without doubt, plagiarism has a diminishing effect on the academic integrity of higher education institutions, making knowledge transfer somewhat impossible. There is therefore, a growing need for lecturers to address the underlying causes. Thus, this paper examines lecturers’ perception and attitude towards plagiarism and its implication for higher education.
The study adopts a survey research design. The simple random sampling was used to select lecturers from Babcock University who participated in this study. Data was collected from 183 lecturers using a structured questionnaire titled ‘perception and attitude towards plagiarism’. Collected data were analysed using descriptive statistics.
The study revealed lecturers are aware of what constitutes plagiarism. Also, majority of the lecturers perceive students plagiarize mostly due to laziness or bad time management (
= 3.73). Likewise, lecturers check for well written sections without references or quotations in detecting plagiarism. It was also revealed that 93% of the respondents give warning to students verbally or through a feedback sheet while only 25% of the lecturers’ sends a plagiarism case to an academic misconduct panel.
It was concluded that lecturers understand what constitutes plagiarism and the means of detecting same. However, formal reporting of plagiarism cases is not commonly practiced by lecturers. It was recommended therefore that Institutions put in place policies to encourage lecturers to formally report cases of plagiarism.