ACADEMIC CYBERPLAGIARISM: A DESCRIPTIVE AND COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE PREVALENCE AMONGST THE UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS AT TECMILENIO UNIVERSITY (MEXICO) AND BALEARIC ISLANDS UNIVERSITY (SPAIN)

In the current paper, we analyse and describe the prevalence of academic integrity violations centred on the elaboration of course essays, and more concretely, the incidence of commission of plagiarism among university undergraduate Spanish and Mexican students from two middle-sized universities. A double analysis perspective of the self-referred response and the attributed response is adopted. To answer the main research questions, we based our work on a cross-sectional survey of the targeted population. The sample consisted of a total of 720 undergraduate students from the Balearic Islands University selected by non-probability sampling and 270 undergraduate students from the Mexican University Tecmilenio selected by random sampling. The research findings, firstly, suggests that plagiarism prevalence is quite higher amongst the Spanish sample than the Mexican sample when compared both; secondly, data obtained show that the Internet has become the students’ main source for the plagiarism of academic essays. Furthermore, there is also a substantial prevalence of self-plagiarism and peer-to-peer (p2p) plagiarism when elaborating essays.
Based on the study findings, the authors suggests that future potential development and research in the field should focus on: a) combining quantitative and qualitative approaches to the phenomenon and the analysis of the causes associated with it, and b) the need for the academic authorities, and judging from the results specially the Spanish ones, to confront and propose solutions to academic dishonesty.