Abstract:

Academic dishonesty, as such, has been defined in different ways and using different principles. Finding an unambiguous and standardized conception is virtually impossible. As pointed Kliban (1993) in a paper on this subject: "One of the main problems, but at the same time reveals the state of the art on the subject, is the lack of a clear definition of academic dishonesty." The fact that it is a construct based on moral and ethical principles, therefore, a time associated with a particular culture and society make it very difficult to give an accurate definition and closed the case. In order to limit as far as possible, this difficulty have opted to provide those basic features or defining characteristics that have used various authors and academic institutions over recent years to refer to this issue.
In this paper we present the results of a survey carried out at the Balearic Islands based on the administration of a questionaire to a representative sample (n=1503) of secondary education students. The questionaire, apart from other dimensions, had the aim of analyzing the opinion of the students regarding the severity and gravity of diverse academic dishonest practices; a total of 9 academic dishonest practices were presented to the students participating in the study. Results suggests that the academic practices considered more severe in the opinion of the students are: copy a whole essay from another student, to copy a whole essay from the internet, to copy during an exam from notes. On the other hand, the practices considered less severe are: to copy parts of an essay from books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc.; to copy parts of an essay from the Internet; to copy a whole essay from books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc.
The results show that students are aware of the severity of certain practices (ie. to copy a whole essay from the Internet) but are more "relaxed" when judging other dishonest practices that do not seem to have such an importance for them, and this fact might help explaining why they commit some forms of academic dishonesty practices as they do not consider them severe.
The research described in this paper is part of the activities carried out in the Research project "Plagiarism amongst Balearic Islands secondary education students" funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation with reference EDU2009-14019-C02-01

Keywords:

Academic integrity, academic plagiarism, secondary education.