Plagiarism Research Methodology

Research Methodology

Data has been collected using structured questionnaire from students pursuing higher education in the field of management in selected institutes in Haryana. 242 students have been approached. 215 duly filled responses have been selected.

Instrument Development

Items 1-11 have been taken from ‘Handout: Plagiarism Attitude Scale’ and remaining 15 items have been taken from en taken from research conducted by Dawson, M. M. and Overfield, J. A. (2006). The responses of management students pursuing higher education in various colleges in Haryana were gathered on 5-point Likert Scale (5 being highest). Judgement sampling method has been used to gather primary data. Secondary data has been collected via internet, research papers

It has been observed that the constructs such as ‘plagiarism is as bad as stealing the final exam ahead of time and memorizing the answers’, ‘because plagiarism involves taking another person’s words and not his or her materials goods, plagiarism is no big deal’, ‘using someone else’s words as if they were your own’, ‘using someone else’s ideas as if they were your own’, ‘it is dishonest’, ‘it steals other people’s ideas’, ‘copy a completed assignment that your friend has emailed to you’, ‘pass off someone else’s work as your own, for your own benefit’ converged on a particular dimension with factor loadings more than 0.5. Copying can be defined as the duplication of information or an artifact based only on an instance of that information or artifact, and not using the process that originally generated it (Wikipedia). With analog forms of information, copying is only possible to a limited degree of accuracy, which depends on the quality of the equipment used and the skill of the operator. There is some inevitable deterioration and accumulation of "noise" (random small changes, not sound) from original to copy; when successive generations of copy are made, this deterioration accumulates with each generation. With digital forms of information, copying is perfect. Copy and paste is frequently

Penalty can be described as a punishment for violating rules of procedure (Wiktionary). The constructs ‘if a student buys or downloads free a whole research paper and turns it in unchanged with his or her name as the author, the student should be expelled from the university’, ‘if I lend a paper to another student to look at, and then that student turns it in as his or her own and is caught, I should not be punished also’, ‘if students caught plagiarizing received a special grade for cheating (such as XF) on their permanent transcript, that policy would deter many from plagiarizing’, ‘using someone else’s results as if they were your own’, ‘you may get caught and lose marks’, ‘assignments that are plagiarised fail to demonstrate your knowledge of the work’ and ‘the punishment for plagiarism in college should be light because we are young people just learning the ropes’ loaded on one particular dimension labeled as ‘Penalty’. Leslee Throckmorton-Belzer, L., Keith-Spiegel, P. and Wrangham, J. (2001) observed an instructor's decision to assign a penalty to all students and to drop an exam score as they showed unwillingness in identifying the students who allegedly cheated; who later on, blamed the cheaters responsible for their penalties. The instructor received only slightly