Where We Don’t Know How to be Ethical; A Research on Understanding Plagiarism

Abstract

This study aims to investigate if people and mainly students are aware of ethical rules of conducting academic work. If students copy materials from other papers and books without proper citation, is it mainly because they do not know the regulations governing referencing academic works? To answer this question and questions regarding other ethical rules of academic work, an online questionnaire was used, through which people were asked specific questions about specific ethical issues. The results showed that even highly educated people did not have sufficient knowledge of the ethical rules and regulations of academic work. The results also indicated that a majority of the respondents preferred to answer an even technical and difficult question with a wrong answer rather than choosing “I don’t know”.

Keywords

• academic ethics
• plagiarism
• referencing
• source