Understanding Perceptions of Undergraduate Students on Academic Plagiarism

Plagiarism, as a type of academic misconduct, is a significant issue in higher education institutions and is described as the spreading of moral panic in academics. Prompted by concerns with the frequency of plagiarism, this investigation examined undergraduate students' perceptions of academic misconduct, forms of plagiarism, and the underlying causes of plagiarism among first-and second-year biology and chemistry majors at the University of Guyana, Turkeyen campus in 2018. The paper also presents students’ recommendations on how to best address the issue in the program. Although the findings of this study cannot be generalised, it was found that more than 90% of students who participated were acquainted with the interpretation of the terms academic misconduct and plagiarism but still plagiarized. Interestingly, the most prevalent form of plagiarism was found to be substituting the author's words with synonyms while maintaining the overall organization and meaning of the original work, and the most common cause of plagiarism was determined to be heavy assessment workload. According to this survey, students favoured penalties over grade loss when it came to avoiding plagiarism. Ultimately, the results reveal how conscious students are of academic integrity and strategies that could lower the quantity of plagiarism cases at the institution.


Introduction
Plagiarism, as a type of academic misconduct, is a significant issue in higher education institutions (Anney & Atanas Mosha, 2015;Selemani et al., 2018;Wilkinson, 2009).Plagiarism is regarded as fraudulent behaviour that diminishes the intellectual property of the original author and rewards plagiarists for their work (Gullifer & Tyson, 2010;Mohamed et al., 2018).Although plagiarism is not a clear-cut issue, higher education institutions may have written guidelines and codes of practice to reduce the occurrence of plagiarism (Owunwanne et al., 2010).
In addition, it was observed at the University of Guyana that different students tend to perceive plagiarism differently.This is supported by the findings of Owunwanne et al. (2010), where they noted that students do not categorize plagiarism as a form of academic misconduct because of the ease of accessing online plagiaristic materials, as opposed to sharing answers during an examination (Owunwanne et al., 2010).However, academic integrity is one of the many important qualities that all educational institutions strive to impart to their students (Owunwanne et al., 2010).It is therefore important to understand students' views about the nature of plagiarism since it continues to dominate higher education as one of its greatest challenges (Kayaoğlu et al., 2015).
The objectives of this study were to investigate students' understanding of academic misconduct and the factors contributing to plagiarism for the first-and second-year undergraduate students enrolled in the Biology and Chemistry Associate Degree programs at the University of Guyana, Turkeyen campus, Guyana.Additionally, this study highlighted what proportion of the surveyed student population would participate in different types of plagiarism and concluded with student's recommendations on how the institution can address the issue of plagiarism.

Materials and Methods
In July 2018, this study was carried out at the Faculty of Natural Sciences (FNS) at the Turkeyen Campus of the University of Guyana.The survey approach was employed in this study's descriptive design.This approach is appropriate for the objectives, which was to have a general perspective on how well students comprehended the notion of plagiarism.The self-administered questionnaire consisted of closed-ended, fixedchoice questions (Robson & McCartan, 2016).The questionnaire was used because it had a predetermined design, made it possible to collect a minimal quantity of data in an organized manner, and made it easier to choose a representative sample of students from a known demographic.Since validated scales were not available, the questionnaire's creation was based on a survey of previously published studies' literature.The twelve (12) closed-ended statements that make up the questionnaire were taken from several sources.There were five sections on the questionnaire:

1)
Student Data: Three verification questions concerning the Department, program in which the student is enrolled, and year of study were gathered.To protect the privacy of the respondents, no additional personal information was gathered.

2)
Awareness of Academic Misconduct: The questions in this part tested the students' knowledge of plagiarism as a form of academic misconduct as well as their familiarity with the term academic misconduct.These were binary (yes/no) questions.

3)
Plagiarism Types: Typical categories and types of plagiarism were covered in this section.The students were given a four-point Likert scale to rate each category on: 1 = Never, 2 = Rarely, 3 = Often, and 4 = Always.

5)
Ways to Address Plagiarism: In this section, students rated several approaches that the institution can use to deal with plagiarism using a four-point Likert scale: 1 = Disagree, 2 = Neutral, 3 = Agree, and 4 = Strongly Agree.
During their laboratory hours, respondents were offered to voluntarily participate in the survey.Students were given a printed questionnaire to complete and return if they accepted.It was suggested to the students to answer every item in the survey.Every piece of information was gathered in an anonymous manner.To avoid identifying which survey form belonged to which student, no personal information was gathered.To prevent any patterns that could link an answer to a student, survey questionnaires were collected randomly.

Student Demographics
Table 1 provides a summary of the student demographics.There were 278 participants total; 67 of them were male and 211 were female.Furthermore, 237 respondents were enrolled in the biology program, 41 in the chemistry program, 170 of whom were firstyear students, and 108 of whom were second-year students respectively.

Awareness of Academic Integrity
The respondents were questioned regarding their knowledge of the terms academic misconduct and plagiarism as being a type of academic misconduct.The survey asked the respondents about forms of plagiarism that are typically committed for written assignments, the reasons for plagiarizing, and the best strategies that the University of Guyana may implement to deter students from plagiarizing.

Students' Familiarity with Academic Misconduct
Table 2 shows the results for survey question 1: Are you familiar with the term 'academic misconduct?' Most respondents (96.0%n=267) indicated that they were familiar with the term "academic misconduct," while the minority (4% n=11) indicated that they were not.

Interpretation of the Meaning of Academic Misconduct
Table 3 shows the results for survey question 2: Do you think the statement below best describes the meaning of academic misconduct?"Any action or attempted action that may result in creating an unfair academic advantage for oneself."64% (n=178) of the 278 respondents thought the statement best captured the meaning of academic misconduct meant, and 11.9 percent (n=33) strongly agreed.Conversely, 4.0% (n=11) argued that the statement did not adequately capture the meaning of academic misconduct, while 20.1% (n=56) of the respondents felt neutral.Notes: *SA = strongly agree; A = agree, N = neutral, D = Disagree.

Plagiarism as a Type of Academic Misconduct
Table 4 shows the results for survey question 3: Do you think Plagiarism is a type of academic misconduct?A significant proportion of participants, specifically 95.7% (n = 266), acknowledged that plagiarism is a type of academic misconduct.Conversely, 4.3% (n = 12) indicated that plagiarism is not regarded as such.

Types of Plagiarism
The eight items on the questionnaire (Table 5) were designed to identify the kinds of plagiarism the respondents used for written assignments.Item #4 (45.0%, the added percentages of always and often), "finds synonyms for the author's language while keeping to the same general structure and meaning of the original work," was the most common type of plagiarism practiced by the respondents when preparing a written assignment.Item #6 was the second most problematic behavior identified, where 27% of the respondents said they would do individual work with a friend.Items #8 (24.5%), #3 (23.4%), and #2 (15.5%) had the third, fourth, and fifth highest frequency of plagiarism, respectively.Item #1 (10.4%) and #5 (6.1%) followed.Furthermore, item #7, which refers to "using someone else's original work that has been purchased from another person, company or website and claiming it as your own," was the least common type of plagiarism reported by respondents, with only 3.6% agreeing to do so.Notes: *A = always; O = often, R = rarely, N = never.

Reasons for Plagiarism
The eight survey items (listed in Table 6) identified the reasons why participants would plagiarise their written assignments.Item #6, "assessment workload", is the most common reason to plagiarise, where 70.1% (the added percentages of strongly agree and agree) of the respondents agreed to this.Only 19.1% of respondents agreed with item #5, "lack of serious consequences," as the least common reason respondents would plagiarize.Notes: *SA = strongly agree; A = agree, N = neutral, D = Disagree

Penalties for Plagiarism
The nine questionnaire items (Table 7) were designed to learn what participants thought the institution should do to prevent students from plagiarizing content for written assignments.
The most acceptable way to deal with plagiarism was determined to be item #1, "issuing of a written warning in cases where the student(s) lacked the understanding of good academic practice," as agreed upon by 80.2% of respondents (the additional percentages representing strongly agree and agree).Respondents also item #2 "require first-time plagiarizers to attend training seminars or workshops on plagiarism," to be the second-best penalty to be applied.In addition, only 8.3% of respondents agreed to receive a failing mark for the entire course in case there was significant academic misconduct (item#5), and 6.1% said that the harshest punishment for plagiarism on written assignments should be expulsion (item #8) from the University of Guyana.Notes: *SA = strongly agree; A = agree, N = neutral, D = Disagree

Discussion
This short-term study intended to find out how familiar higher education students were with the terms academic misconduct and plagiarism as a subset of it, as well as the types of plagiarism that are typically committed for written assignments, the motivations behind them, and potential measures the University of Guyana could take to prevent plagiarism.Due to empirical proof of a significant volume of plagiarized work submitted by first-and second-year biology and chemistry majors, this brief research investigation was taken into consideration to understand students' perceptions of the issue.The results revealed that 96.0% of the biology and chemistry majors registered in level one and two of their programs were highly familiar with the term academic misconduct.Additionally, many of the student respondents (74.9%) acknowledged that they understood what academic misconduct entailed.Furthermore, most respondents (95.7%) acknowledged that plagiarism is a form of academic dishonesty.
Further, the results indicated that both student groups were adequately informed about the value of academic integrity by the University of Guyana.Lecturers in the biology department would have been using course tutorials and other training sessions at this time to teach first-and second-year biology and chemistry students about the university's policies and guidelines regarding academic misconduct, which includes plagiarism and how to avoid it.For instance, during the first week of tutorials for the courses BIO1102 (Level I, Semester I, Biology and Chemistry majors), BIO2107 (Level II, Semester I, Biology majors), and BIO2205 (Level II, Semester II, Biology and Chemistry majors) in the academic year 2017-2018, students were briefed on the rule of the university regarding plagiarism and taught how to cite sources using the Sixth Edition of the American Psychological Association (APA) Referencing and Citation Style.
Additionally, the results showed that the two most prevalent types of plagiarism committed by students for written assignments were using synonyms for the author's language while keeping to the same general structure and meaning of the original work and doing individual work with a friend (Table 6).This result is more consistent with Owunwanne et al. (2010) Wilkinson's (2009) findings, which showed that the most common types of plagiarism were copying a few paragraphs of an essay from a book or website, failing to cite sources, and working with another student on specific assignments.Similarly, Owunwanne et al. (2010)found that a significant instance of academic dishonesty was characterized by student respondents as providing assistance to a friend in order to finish an assignment that was supposed to be completed independently outside of class.This makes a compelling case for a discussion on academic ethics in higher education institutions.
To determine why students at the UG would plagiarize, the results showed that respondents justified their actions by alluding to their busy schedules, lack of understanding of the assessment item, assessment workload, and lack of knowledge about how to properly cite sources.This aligns with the research conducted by Kayaoğlu et al. (2015), which indicated that the most common causes of plagiarism were hectic schedules and inadequate academic skills.Furthermore, Wilkinson (2009) discovered that poor time management, indolence, and a lack of knowledge of citation guidelines were the main causes of plagiarism.Moreover, the issue with assessment workload is supported by the requirement that all first-and second-year biology and chemistry courses include a minimum of five in-class tests and four written assignments.These may be the main causes of plagiarism in written assignments when combined with the other obligations that students have as adult learners.
Students tended to err on the side of lesser penalties that did not result in a loss of marks when questioned about suitable consequences for plagiarism.For instance, 80.2% of students said that in the event of a first offense, they would rather receive a written warning and then go to workshops or training seminars on plagiarism.This agrees with Wilkinson's (2009) findings, which showed that students preferred warnings over grade loss for initial offenses.
Furthermore, one significant limitation of this study is that the student cohort was relatively homogenous with respect to program level and discipline which means that the findings might not be applied to different student groups.As age, gender, and experience with academia may influence attitudes to academic misconduct, future studies using larger more heterogeneous student groups are recommended.Future research with larger and more diverse student groups is advised because attitudes about academic misconduct may be influenced by factors such as age, gender, and academic experience.Despite these limitations, the study has demonstrated that students are aware of plagiarism and academic misconduct, and they are aware of the types and reasons for their own behaviors.Further, the University of Guyana can use these statistics to design programs that enhance preventive and instructional methods to reduce plagiarism while enhancing students' knowledge and attitudes towards academic integrity.This is crucial for students who are unfamiliar with standards of academia, and effective support services will make it easier for them to adjust to a world that is much different from that of a high school.

Conclusion
This study sampled first-and second-year undergraduate students enrolled in the Biology and Chemistry programs using a questionnaire because the researcher was concerned about the prevalence of plagiarism among the selected student population in the setting of the researcher's teaching environment.The results are not broadly applicable due to their relative homogeneity with the student population.The results do, however, reveal information regarding students' knowledge of academic integrity and strategies that could lower the quantity of plagiarism instances at the University of Guyana.
Regarding awareness of plagiarism and academic misconduct, many students are familiar with how these terms are interpreted.Interestingly, the most common kind of plagiarism committed by respondents when completing a written assignment was found to be substituting synonyms for the author's words while maintaining the original work's general structure and content.The fact that the respondents most frequently plagiarized when preparing assignments has an intriguing side note as well.
What is also striking in the context of this study is that students chose penalties that is, non-mark-deduction penalties, to avoid plagiarism.
More research should be done at the University of Guyana across all departments, curricula, and academic levels to investigate how students understand plagiarism as they progress through their individual academic programs.Furthermore, research is required to compare the attitudes, experiences, and opinions of male and female undergraduate students at the University of Guyana about plagiarism.Finally, in accordance with Hrasky & Kronenberg (2011), who contend that sharing responsibility among students, faculty, and the institution rather than placing the entire burden on the student alone is the best strategy to prevent plagiarism.Therefore, it is imperative to plan a follow-up study that would investigate how faculty and students at the University of Guyana perceive plagiarism.