Awareness, attitude and perception of plagiarism among students and teachers at Stockholm University

Abstract: The department of Computer and Systems Sciences (DSV) at Stockholm University has experienced an increasing in the amount of international students that enrolled in the programs as well as an increasing in the worry about the issue of plagiarism in campus and online courses. The main purpose of this thesis was to investigate if the awareness, attitudes and perception of plagiarism among students and teachers were equivalent in writing and programming assignments as well as how online and classroom teaching impacted in the issue of plagiarism. The research consisted of paper and online surveys as well as semi-structured interviews. In total, there were 71 participants (47 students and 24 teachers) in the first phase of the research, text plagiarism and 101 participants (97 students and 4 teachers) in the second phase of the research, code plagiarism. The main results obtained show that the issue of plagiarism was not entirely clear both for students and teachers. Students and teachers from both groups (code and text plagiarism) had the same opinion in many topics such as the one regarding having clear information about what is allowed and not allowed, but in some other topics their opinion diverged greatly, for instance combining pieces of code taken from a book or internet was totally acceptable in programming while the same did not apply in writing assignments. These results were taken into account to consider the possibility that even though plagiarism was a common issue, there were some differences on what is allowed and not allowed in terms of code and text plagiarism. The thesis ends with a discussion about the results obtained from the research, presents some recommendations to how to deal with plagiarism and provides the reader with some future work suggestions.