Academic staff's perspectives upon student plagiarism: a case study at a university in Hong Kong

Abstract

Much of the previous research concerning student plagiarism has been conducted in Anglo-American settings. The present paper reports a case study of academic staff's perspectives upon student plagiarism at a university in Hong Kong. Based on interviews with 16 instructors, the study focused on the teachers' views and pedagogical practices, including their use of Turnitin. The paper ends by noting certain areas that need to be addressed in tackling student plagiarism and by proposing a few lines of future research.

Keywords::

• English-medium universities
• university policies against plagiarism
• student plagiarism
• Turnitin

Notes

^1. The university's “Disciplinary Committee Regulations” and “Regulations Governing the Hearing of Appeals from the Disciplinary Committee” (which are pursuant to specific sections of relevant statutes of the HKU Ordinance (Calendar, 2011–2012) provide a reference to the sanction procedures that involve the University Disciplinary Committee.

^2. The RA was a part-time PhD student in education, with years of experience of working as research staff at the university. The fact that both my RA and I were colleagues of the participants in the same university was likely to have encouraged the participants' candid discussions of views. Nevertheless, it is equally worth noting that, given the sensitive nature of the topic of the interviews, the participants' responses might be influenced by “social desirability” (Nederhof, 1985), or, a desire to present themselves in a positive light and hide away their inadequate practices.

^3. Self-plagiarism, not discussed by the participants during the interviews, could also be a potential issue here and when it takes the form of submitting the same homework twice, it clearly falls into the category of cheating (Wilkinson, 2009).

^4. It is generally believed (and indeed noted by P6) that the teaching practices at the immensely popular local tutorial schools have helped to foster this trend of favouring model answers among school students in Hong Kong (see Kwo & Bray, 2011). Plagiarism-related issues surrounding transition from secondary to tertiary education have been discussed in the contexts of Hong Kong (Deckert, 1993; Li & Casanave, 2012), Japan (LoCastro & Masuko, 2002), UK (Elander, Westrup, Caldwell, Foxcroft, & Norton, 2010), Australia (Bretag, 2007; McGowan, 2005b), and North America (Klompien, 2001).