Abstract:

This paper describes a practical experience showing the importance of regulating plagiarism at the University. Although plagiarism is by no means a new concept and it has traditionally been associated with academia, the development of new information and comunication technologies has led to the general consensus that its incidence has grown in scale. The use of this practice, which is not always easy to identify, not only has implications for student’s evaluation, but it also negatively affects the development of core ethical values such as honesty, integrity, personal effort and respect for the work of others. In some cases, the lack of regulation, the failure to detect its use, or the lack of knowledge about the existence of tools that facilitate its detection make this behavior to be unpunished.
The context in which this exercise takes place is the course Strategic Management at Universidad de La Rioja (Spain). As many other European Universities, the Universidad de La Rioja has adapted its degrees to the new European Higher Education framework. Among other important challenges, the framework highlights the importance of acquiring a set of specific and general skills as a result of completing students’ training. For example, the capacity to work in teams, the ability to apply theoretical knowledge in practice and ethical commitment. Therefore, in our context, plagiarims is seen as a form of non-ethical behavior that must be avoided by students.
By the beginning of the 2011-2012 academic year, we delivered information on the expected skills that students should achieve and on the desirable behavior through the Strategic Management course guide. This document also informed students of the concept of plagiarims and warned them about the risk of detecting any irregular behavior in any of the documents they should hand in along the course. All the assignments were treated through the Blackboard platform. A positive feature of this platform is that provides us with a tool, called Safe Assign, which checks for plagiarism through a comparison between several Internet sources and student’s written works.
The students had to submit six documents with the answers to practical questions related to the topics of the course, and a final essay. Out of the seven documents, we checked for plagiarism in three of the exercises and on the final essay. This was done for each of the twenty four working groups (104 documents). Once the reports were obtained, these were classified according to the following thresholds: scores below 15%; scores between 15% and 40%; and scores over 40%. Thirteen documents obtained a plagiarism score over 40%. The average score ranges from 15.96% to 31.20%. The lowest value corresponds to the final essay (this activity has a higher weighting in the final course grading than the exercises). Interestingly, temporal comparison between scores obtained indicates that those working teams that obtain higher scores in the second practice also obtain higher scores in the third one. This correlation also is obtained between the third practice and the final essay.
In relation with plagiarism sources, the analysis of results show that Internet pages such as Wikipedia and slideshare are used in more than 60% of the cases. They are followed by corporate web pages with a 25% and, finally, economic press with, approximately, 12%.

Keywords:

University, student plagiarism, ethical behaviour, plagiarism sources.