What’s Wrong With Plagiarizing? High School and College Students’ Reasoning About Acts of Copying

• In Event: Moral Reasoning From Childhood to Emerging Adulthood: New Perspectives

Abstract

Though most adults believe that plagiarism is wrong, most students plagiarize at least once in their academic careers (McCabe et al., 2012; Park, 2003; Waltzer et al., 2018). This apparent tension between judgments and actions raises several questions: Are students simply unconcerned with academic integrity? Is plagiarism only wrong because they could get in trouble? Or do students struggle to recognize plagiarism, and hence plagiarize unknowingly? Answers to these questions are likely to change from high school to college as students encounter changing pressures and norms surrounding plagiarism.
High school (N = 82, 48% girls, mean age = 16.39) and college students (N = 44, 64% women, mean age = 19.91) participated in structured interviews about a hypothetical scenario in which a character submits a text that is either similar to or different from a viewed source (Figure 1). Students were asked to judge whether the act was OK, explain why, rate it on a scale of 0 (“Really bad”) to 10 (“Really good”), and to decide whether it constituted plagiarism. Responses were categorized according to established coding schemes (Cohen’s Kappas > .90). Hypotheses were tested using generalized linear mixed models and likelihood ratio tests.
Many high school students (60%) and college students (36%) spontaneously expressed uncertainty about whether the student acts were wrong or constituted plagiarism. For example, one high schooler said: “I’m more inclined towards no [it does not count as plagiarism], but it’s not a 100% no.” Additionally, nearly half of high schoolers (40%) believed the “different” text was plagiarized, highlighting disagreement across participants. College students were far less likely to view this text as plagiarized (14%), p = .046.
Students overwhelmingly evaluated acts they perceived as plagiarism to be wrong (93%) and rated them more negatively (M = 2.51) compared to those they did not perceive as plagiarism (2% wrong, M = 7.09), ps < .001. College students’ evaluations were more extreme than those of high school students (ps < .042), judging more cases they perceived as plagiarism to be wrong (100% vs. 89%) and rating cases of non-plagiarism more positively (M = 7.96 vs. 6.45).
Most participants (80%) provided more than one justification for their judgments. When asked to explain why they thought the character’s actions were wrong, students commonly referenced the fact that the character’s act constituted copying (95%), that the action was unfair or prevented due credit from being received (41%), and that the character was stealing from someone else (39%). High school students reasoned that the character was not learning or putting effort into the assignment (53%) more often than did college students (24%), p = .014 (Figure 2).
The findings show that students care about integrity, but sometimes struggle to agree on what counts as plagiarism. In addition, students’ reasoning about plagiarism goes beyond mere references to rules, including moral concerns with fairness and intellectual property, as well as student learning. This research suggests that judgments about plagiarism are highly contextualized, such that students may accept plagiarism in cases of ambiguity or low potential for learning.

Authors

• Talia Waltzer, University of California - San Diego
  Presenting Author

• Audun Dahl, University of California - Santa Cruz
  Non-Presenting Author