Lecturers Perception Of Plagiarism Among Undergraduates In Nigeria

Abstract

The advent of the internet and the ensuing free access to increasingly available information resources and possibilities for students’ ‘copying and pasting’ text from online documents has raised so much concern. There is therefore a growing need for lecturers to address the underlying causes. Thus, this study examines faculty perception of plagiarism among Undergraduates. The study adopted a survey research design. A simple and total enumeration sampling techniques was adopted to cover all the entire lecturers in the faculty of education, Federal University Oye-Ekiti (FUOYE). The instrument use for data collection was the questionnaire titled “Faculty Perception of Plagiarism among Undergraduates’’ (FPPU). Reliability and validity test was conducted on the instrument. A total of 63 copies of questionnaire (97%) were returned and found usable. Data collected were analyzed with the use of descriptive analysis. The findings shows that the reasons for plagiarism among undergraduates includes students laziness (mean=3.44), easy access to materials via the internet (mean=3.27) and not understanding the rules of referencing (mean= 3.27). However, lecturers perception of plagiarism among undergraduates indicates that undergraduates copying of few paragraph of an essay from books without citation (mean= 3.48). Furthermore, lecturers put up some strategies in detecting plagiarize work which includes; using the library shelves to provide evidence (mean =1.84), using specialized plagiarism detecting tools (mean= 1.40), and using online searching tools to provide evidence (mean= 1.38). Consequences for plagiarism among undergraduates include; scoring the students 0% on the assignment (mean= 1.56) and cannot attend classes for a specific amount of time (mean = 1.81). The study therefore, concluded that lecturers understand the offence of plagiarism and therefore have some punitive measures towards the act of plagiarism. It was further recommended that undergraduates should be enlightened adequately on research methodology courses to be taught at various levels of study and handled by experienced lecturers.