Resumen de An investigation of international postgraduate engineering students’ attitudes and abilities related to avoiding plagiarism

Brad Stappenbelt, Senevi Kiridena, David Hastie, Abheek Basu

• Plagiarism committed by international postgraduate students who come from a non-English speaking background(NESB) has been raised repeatedly as a pressing academic concern. In this study, postgraduate engineering students’ viewsabout plagiarism and their ability to detect and avoid plagiarism were examined using a survey instrument. The primaryquestion investigated was whether there was any discernible variation in attitudes and abilities between students fromdifferent cultural and linguistic backgrounds. As such, the survey (n=416) was designed to assess students’ ability torecognise and rate the severity of plagiarism in a series of writing samples. The responses were collated by birth country andcompared by the major geographic regions represented. All participantswere invitedto give further insight in a post-surveyinterview where their ability to correct identified plagiarised work was also tested. The results revealed that there werenotable differences between the geographical sub-group students’ ethical stance and their abilities to identify plagiarism.Furthermore, the variation in attitudes and abilities was still evident after at least a semester of postgraduate study. Theplagiarism detection exercise indicated that although the Oceania sub-groupwere better at identifying plagiarised material,the other sub-groups (consisting entirely of students from either a NESB or with English as a second language) were nearlyas proficient. Skill deficiencies and language issues, representing potentially significant disadvantage with respect toacademic writing, were evident however when these students were asked to correct the identified plagiarised material.