Assessing knowledge of and attitudes towards plagiarism and ability to recognize plagiaristic writing among university students in Rwanda

This study was conducted to assess knowledge of and attitudes towards plagiarism, as well as ability to recognize plagiaristic writing, among university students in Rwanda. An anonymous online questionnaire containing 10 knowledge questions, 10 attitude statements, and 5 writing cases with excerpts to test identification of plagiarism was administered between February and April 2021. The four key measures of this study were: - Knowledge level on plagiarism. The knowledge score was calculated as the percentage of correct answers. The knowledge level was defined as high if the score was 80% or above, and as low if the score was below 80% (Koo, Poh, Ruzita, 2015). - Attitude towards plagiarism. Percentages of respondents strongly agreed/agreed and strongly disagreed/disagreed on each of the 10 attitude statements. - Level of ability to recognize plagiaristic writing. The score was calculated as the percentage of correctly identified plagiaristic writings in the case studies. The ability level was defined as high if the score was 80% or above, and as low if the score was below 80% (Koo, Poh, Ruzita, 2015). - Themes emerging from the open-ended question. Out of the 330 university students from 40 universities completed the survey, 75.8% had a high knowledge level (score ≥80%) and 11.6% had a high score in recognizing plagiaristic writing (score ≥80%). There was no statistical significant association between knowledge level and ability to recognize plagiaristic writing (P=0.109). Lower odds were found in both diploma/certificate and bachelor students of having high knowledge as well as of having high ability to recognize plagiaristic writing. Although the general disapproves of plagiarism, approximately half of the respondents indicated that sometimes plagiarism is unavoidable, and self-plagiarism should not be punished in the same way as plagiarism of others