A Preliminary Study to Determine Attitudes towards Plagiarism in Information Systems

Plagiarism, a component of academic misconduct has captured the headlines of many Australian media reports in recent months. While many articles have been written in the education domain about plagiarism, limited empirical evidence was found on the factors leading to the attitudes of plagiarism and students opinion on these attitudes. This is because many prior studies have focused their findings arising from the institutional data available on plagiarism and compiling these into a form of findings, without actually consulting either students or lecturers involved in teaching. This study, to alleviate such criticism, followed a qualitative method to develop a theme to identify factors that can contribute to plagiarism in the opinion of lecturers and tutors. This theme was then followed up by a quantitative method to extract perceptions towards these attitudes from students based on an adapted instrument. The outcomes of the theme development and perception measurement are reported in this study with a hope that academics in educational setting can produce fair and more reliable assessment methods