Exploring the Attitude and Reasons for Academic (Dis)Honesty among Undergraduate Students

The present study aimed at investigating the perception of GE and ESP students of Sharif University of Technology toward plagiarism, how their professors deal with this issue, and why they might plagiarize. The participants were 234 undergraduate students (164 male, 70 female) with a minimum age of 20 years old (SD = 1.81). The instrument used was a validated plagiarism questionnaire taken from Rezanejad and Rezaei (2013). The results indicated that in general there was a relative agreement on their definition of plagiarism and its ethical issues; 81.1% of the respondents believed that “Plagiarism is using someone else’s ideas as if they were their own” and 90.6% of the students thought that plagiarism is ethically wrong because “it is dishonest”. On the practical side of the issue, 92.3% of the respondents stated that they would be accused of plagiarism if they “pass off someone else’s work as their own and for their own benefit”. Regarding the students perception toward their professors, they mostly argued that professors at universities generally “guess about who might have done plagiarism (57.7%)” and “do not care about detecting plagiarism (47.9%)”. Moreover, they claimed that students may plagiarize because of “easiness of plagiarizing (85%)” and “lack of time to meet the deadlines (84.4%)”.