Students’ perceptions and evaluations of plagiarism: Effects of text and context

ABSTRACT

As they navigate academic life, students must decide whether the acts of copying they encounter constitute plagiarism, and whether those acts are wrong. The present study investigated students’ perceptions, evaluations, and reasoning about copying. In interviews about hypothetical scenarios involving copying, undergraduates (N = 60) reported whether the characters’ actions constituted plagiarism, whether the actions were wrong, and why. Students’ perceptions varied depending on textual similarity and type of academic task. When students perceived an act as plagiarism, they almost always believed it was wrong. In explaining their evaluations of plagiarism, students commonly referenced concerns about learning consequences, rules, and fairness. As expected, most students expressed uncertainty about what constitutes plagiarism and whether copying was wrong. The findings validate a new method and highlight the need for a situated theoretical model of decision-making that goes beyond stable characteristics and incorporates perceptions, evaluations, and reasoning about specific texts and contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Copying
• academic integrity
• moral reasoning
• ambiguity
• decision-making

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the participants in this study for their time and thoughtful responses in the interviews. We would also like to thank Kavitha Hari, Giovanni Gonzalez, and Elina Berman for their assistance in conducting interviews and transcribing data. We would also like to thank Abigail Bolter and Arvid Samuelson for their contributions to data organization and coding of open-ended responses. We also thank past and present members of the Early Social Interaction Lab and the Academic Orientations Project at the University of California, Santa Cruz for their feedback on earlier versions of the manuscript.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Authors’ statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/4KPBR/, doi: 10.17605/OSF.IO/4KPBR.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Talia Waltzer

Talia Waltzer is a doctoral student in Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Talia Waltzer’s research focuses on moral development and decision-making, aiming to employ theoretically meaningful empirical investigations that have practical implications for education and policy.

Audun Dahl

Audun Dahl is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2014. His research investigates how children and adults develop concerns with matters of right and wrong, and how those concerns guide judgments and decisions.