Why Do Students Still Plagiarize? Perceptions of EFL and Non-EFL Students on Plagiarism

Abstract

This paper is an investigation on the perception of Kurdish EFL and non-EFL students on plagiarism, as well as the causes that make students resort to it. A group of students participated in the research paper who were enrolled in different departments at one of the universities in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. The data was collected through a questionnaire followed by interviews to get a better understanding of the phenomenon in question. The findings of the current study show that there is a misconception about the idea of plagiarism and students mostly consider copying and pasting material as plagiarism. This led to the understanding that paraphrasing does not really constitute plagiarism, and that shows that the issue is limited to the stealing of words not ideas in most cases. The results also show that there are a number of other factors that lead students to resort to plagiarism, including lack of time, lack of understanding of the concept, language skills, high school education background, workload and lack of critical thinking skills.