STRATEGIES EMPLOYED BY THE TERTIARY INSTRUCTORS IN PREVENTING THE OCCURRENCE OF ACADEMIC DISHONESTY

A bigger volume of researches discuss about plagiarism in the tertiary level. With the given phenomenon and accessibility of the internet, it has become a lot easier for students to download and copy someone else’s work and submit papers where authors are not cited well. There are also several researches which show that plagiarizing a paper is not entirely the students’ fault as this could have been avoided if only their instructors employed strategies to prevent its occurrence.

This paper then looks into the strategies employed by the instructors in research courses in preventing the occurrence of academic cheating or plagiarism in the classroom. The students were asked to respond to a survey questionnaire and to the interview. These students identified that although majority of their instructors gave a brief reminder on honesty and not to forget to cite resources on their papers, they also expressed that a large percentage of their instructors did not use a plagiarism detection software or any web-based plagiarism detection services. Instructors also did not employ the use of requirements which are difficult to plagiarize. Students, and teachers also agree, said that they were not asked to attend a workshop or training on avoiding plagiarism. Discussion on the ethical and moral issues related to academic cheating was also not administered. Teachers admitted that only few of them wrote and explicitly explained on the course syllabus the plagiarism guidelines. This paper also determined if differences exist in the extent the tertiary faculty prevented the occurrence of academic dishonesty/plagiarism in terms of experience, gender and status. It can also be noted that more than 80% of students think that fellow students have plagiarized in one way or another.