Dealing with Students’ Plagiarism Pre-Emptively Through Teaching Proper Information Exploitation

Abstract

The present contribution looks into the much discussed issue of student plagiarism, which is conjectured to stem from problems with information searching and exploitation, underdeveloped exposition skills and difficulty in using sources, especially concerning quotations and references. The aim of the study is to determine how effective pre-emptive measures can be if information exploitation and writing from sources are approached as skills that need to be taught. The results show that addressing source use as a skill tends to gradually if slowly reduce the number of plagiarized assignments submitted by students.