Philippine E-Journals

Awareness of Internet Plagiarism among the Secondary School Students in Gombak, Selangor, Malaysia

Rajiah Hasan

Discipline: Social Science

 

Abstract:

Plagiarism has long been a problem in educational setting and with the advent of the Internet revolution and highly user-friendly word processing software, plagiarism has become a widespread phenomenon. Internet exposes students to a multitude of resources in their learning process. Ironically, these phenomena also brought tremendous opportunities for the plagiarism on cyberspace to take place. Students freely copy and paste informations directly from Internet in the assignments and claimed the works as theirs. Very limited research had been done and there are no study had been conducted in secondary school students in Malaysia. This study aims to investigate the reasons behind the increased phenomena of the internet plagiarism among students in one of the secondary schools in Gombak, Selangor, Malaysia. Data collection and the subsequent analyses were guided by qualitative research methods with the theoretical backdrop of Rogers Model of Innovation-Decision Process (Rogers, 1962). In this research, researcher uses the term “awareness of the internet plagiarism” as the “innovation”. 4 themes emerged from this research, namely (1) lack and limited knowledge (2) lack and limited awareness and (3) normal phenomena (4) easy access to Internet. These themes are discussed with reference to the finding of other studies in plagiarism and the implication for the continuum of the education in Malaysia is pointed out.