'AVOID PLAGIARISM, PROMOTE HIGHER EDUCATION': DOES THE SITUATION DEMAND FOR THE SOCIAL MARKETING APPROACH AT RAJSHAHI UNIVERSITY?

Background:
The world of higher education is among the fastest growing and most exciting areas of the community. Higher education of the 21st century brings remarkable changes in the different field of social and community development. In this present context, Higher Educational institutions face a significant number of challenges in the ways of providing better qualitative education. When we talk about the quality of higher education, some related issues come into forward. Plagiarism is one of them. Academic dishonesty like plagiarism in academic work has been treated as an important issue and challenge in promoting higher education. Plagiarism is a serious offense in which students or researcher takes credit for works that not belong to him. It has become a matter of vast concern and appears to be a growing problem throughout our educational system.

Purpose and Aim:
The purpose of this study is to understand the level of awareness about the issues of ‘plagiarism in higher education’ amongst the post-graduate student at Public Universities of Bangladesh. After knowing the ground realities the aim of the study is to get the views of distinguished educators-scholars-faculties, as the stakeholders, for finding the ways out in this regard.

Methodology:
The Rajshahi University Campus was chosen as the area of this research from where a total number of three hundred and thirty four post-graduate level student (Masters, MPhil and PhD) had been taken as the respondents of the study. A self-reported questionnaire survey was used for collecting primary data to know the ground realities and Key Informants' Interview (KII) was conducted to propose a social marketing based awareness building strategy for students.

Result and conclusion:
The major findings of this study reveal that the quality of higher education at Rajshahi University is at a satisfactory level and students are not facing some kinds of problem in the ways of achieving higher education. At the same time, it also reveals that the concept of plagiarism is not clear among the student. Most of them have a little knowledge regarding this issue, which is not enough for the students to combat with plagiarism. This is why sometimes students copying another person’s concept, ideas and intellectual works on their assignments or other types of academic writing without properly acknowledging the original sources. Reasons of plagiarism include lack of knowledge about plagiarism and how to avoid it, time constraints, influence from other student tendency, failed to understand the assignment or research topic properly,etc. Though most of the students believe that doing plagiarism is wrong, but due to the lack of proper knowledge, intention and positive attitude it is essential to take initiatives for their behavioral change.

From the expert opinions, the study reveals that the problems could be solved by creating awareness among student in terms of referencing, in-text citation and paraphrasing etc. At the same time, experts opinions also reveal that the awareness creating activities like incorporating information literacy courses in the different curricula of the university through the collaboration among key actors in this regard, providing instructions through university’s plagiarism policy guidelines and, finally implementation of different behavioral changing strategies based on social-marketing approach could be of help in reducing such problems and challenges.