Abstract

MEDINA DIAZ, María del R.  and  VERDEJO CARRION, Ada L.. Frequency of students' behaviors related to plagiarism in a university in Puerto Rico. Innovaciones Educativas [online]. 2022, vol.24, n.spe1, pp.21-40. ISSN 2215-4132.  http://dx.doi.org/10.22458/ie.v24iespecial.4237.

Behaviors associated with plagiarism committed by students in universities in different countries have been reported in plentiful research over time. This article presents the results of the second cross-sectional survey conducted at a public university in Puerto Rico to pin down the frequency of behaviors associated with academic dishonesty and, in particular, plagiarism among students in undergraduate programs. Three hundred and sixty students answered the Academic Honesty Questionnaire-Revised. As a result, the frequency and percentage of plagiarism-related behaviors admitted and observed in the institutions' students were obtained. These are the three most frequently admitted behaviors: (a) paraphrasing or using ideas or words of a person or source without indicating it; (b) inserting in the bibliography references that were not consulted; (c) verbatim copying information from any printed material without citing its author or indicating it in a footnote or elsewhere in a text. A higher percentage of the students observed behaviors associated with plagiarism: (a) copying quotes, words, phrases, or paragraphs from printed works, without indicating the source; (b) copying and pasting into a written work, phrases, sentences, parts of documents or pages copied from the Internet, without indicating the source; and (c) produce a written work using parts copied verbatim from Internet pages or documents. Like other studies, the results indicate that they attribute a higher frequency to acts of plagiarism observed in their peers. In addition, they resort to both printed and Internet sources to copy information without indicating the source and self-plagiarism of previous works.

Keywords : plagiarism; academic fraud; ethics; university; Puerto Rico; student behavior.

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