Defining plagiarism: Student and staff perceptions of a grey concept

Abstract

The spectacular rise of the Internet and the associated 'copy-paste culture' of generation Y students have brought plagiarism to greater public attention since the late 1990s. Studies reported in numerous academic articles have found that many students commit plagiarism either unwittingly or from lack of skill. This article aims firstly to show that plagiarism is often caused by pedagogical shortcomings due to the difficulty of defining plagiarism accurately. It shows how popular definitions of plagiarism actually overlap with the lower levels of taxonomies of learning and how the concepts of novelty, paraphrasing and application of information are context-sensitive in academia. An attempt is made to define plagiarism anew and a questionnaire that was distributed to 17 000 students and 810 staff members at the North-West University is used to identify the different perceptions of students and staff in defining plagiarism.