Institutional Demands vs. Historical Baggage: What do Postgraduate Students Perceive of Plagiarism?

Abstract

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.