Plagiarism Among Iranian Graduate Students of Language Studies: Perspectives and Causes

In this study, we investigated the ability of Iranian students of applied linguistics to discern plagiarism in writing, their perceptions of its ethical aspects, their characterizations of plagiarists, and their perspectives on why they may commit plagiarism. In so doing, a slightly revised version of Deckert’s 1993 questionnaire, collecting both quantitative and qualitative data, was electronically distributed among 156 graduate students of applied linguistics. The results of the quantitative data analysis revealed some understanding of the concept but an inconsistent performance in recognizing plagiarism. Regarding issues of ethics and fairness, they were concerned with their own needs along with the original writer’s rights more than with rights of their classmates, colleagues, or teachers. They regarded unfamiliarity with the concept and nature of plagiarism as the main reason for committing it. The analysis of the qualitative data yielded the following reasons for students’ plagiarism: students’ unfamiliarity with plagiarism, students’ low academic writing skills, teachers’ carelessness and leniency, students’ lack of time, students’ laziness and deceitfulness, educational system and its policies, students’ low language proficiency, students’ unfamiliarity with the subject of writing, and teachers’ high expectations. In conclusion, some suggestions are offered as to how to decrease the rate of plagiarism.     

Effects of Personality and Information Technology on Plagiarism: An Iranian Perspective

Information technology has played a remarkably important role in developing the contemporary educational system. It not only provides easy access to enormous stores of information but also increases students' scientific efficiency. However, the availability of this technology has also led to increased plagiarism. This study attempted to explore how access to Internet technology contributes to plagiarism problems from the perspective of university students in Iran. A qualitative method to semistructured interviews with 20 students suggested important themes: uncertainty avoidance, tendency to use shortcuts to progress, symbolic certification, social learning and modeling of faculty members as mentors, and plagiarism in the name of justice. Survey data from 180 university students suggest that the personality characteristic of conscientiousness had a negative effect on using information technology to commit plagiarism.     

Plagiarism as a Social Contract,a New Way to Approach Plagiarism

Journal of Academic Ethics - Most cases of plagiarism involve a power differential where not every person has the same ability to enter into a social contract. A social contract requires that each...     

Academic Dishonesty at Universities: The Case of Plagiarism Among Iranian Language Students

This study investigated Iranian language students’ perception of and familiarity with plagiarism, their attitudes toward their professors regarding this issue, and their reasons for doing so. The participants were 122 undergraduate and graduate language students in Translation, Literature, TEFL, and Linguistics who filled out a validated and piloted questionnaire. Overall, the results indicated that students had different views about the definition of plagiarism and plagiarism was mostly perceived by students as using someone else’s words as if they were their own rather than taking someone’s ideas without permission. It was also found that in their academic career, students mostly consider copying a completed assignment of their friend as an act of academic dishonesty. In addition, they mostly argued that professors at universities guess about who might have done plagiarism instead of checking it themselves and they used different strategies to detect plagiarism. The study also indicated that Iranian students had different reasons for plagiarism but they mostly plagiarize because of easiness of plagiarism. Finally, the results of the survey showed that the majority learned about plagiarism from their university professors.     

Perceptions of and Attitudes toward Plagiarism and Factors Contributing to Plagiarism: a Review of Studies

The abundance of information technology and electronic resources for academic materials has contributed to the attention given to research on plagiarism from various perspectives. Among the issues that have attracted researchers’ attention are perceptions of plagiarism and attitudes toward plagiarism. This article presents a critical review of studies that have been conducted to examine staff’s and students’ perceptions of and attitudes toward plagiarism. It also presents a review of studies that have focused on factors contributing to plagiarism. Our review of studies reveals that most of the studies on perceptions of plagiarism and attitudes toward plagiarism lack an in-depth analysis of the relationship between the perceptions of plagiarism and other contextual, sociocultural and institutional variables, or the relationship between attitudes toward plagiarism and students’ perceptions of various forms of plagiarism. Although our review shows that various factors can contribute to plagiarism, there is no taxonomy that can account for all these factors. Some suggestions for future research are provided in this review article.     

Plagiarism: Words and Ideas

Plagiarism is a crime against academy. It deceives readers, hurts plagiarized authors, and gets the plagiarist undeserved benefits. However, even though these arguments do show that copying other people's intellectual contribution is wrong, they do not apply to the copying of words. Copying a few sentences that contain no original idea (e.g. in the introduction) is of marginal importance compared to stealing the ideas of others. The two must be clearly distinguished, and the 'plagiarism' label should not be used for deeds which are very different in nature and importance.     

Academia and career development: toward integration

Traditional career development theories typically stress those aspects of the environment that are directly related to occupational performance. In this article the authors expand the traditional concept of the environment so that it includes the institutional press in which the individual functions. They explore a specific dimension of the institutional press, that of the relationship between the academic departments of a university and the career development of its students. They develop and illustrate a counseling intervention aimed at modifying the press of a university's academic department to make its orientation more consonant with the career development needs of its students, and they define the function of a career development consultant in this process.     

Paired-Associate Learning in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder as a Function of Hyperactivity-Impulsivity and Oppositional Defiant Disorder

A paired-associate learning (PAL) test was administered to 22 community volunteers without disruptive disorders and 197 children (7.5–13.5 years-old) presenting with the inattentive and combined subtypes of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) either in combination with or without oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). Participants were screened for learning disorders. In comparison to non-ADHD participants, children with ADHD achieved worse PAL and made errors rated as more acoustically and less semantically similar to the correct paired associates. These deficits were not related to hyperactivity–impulsivity or comorbid ODD. These results suggest that ADHD children are less competent at PAL and use less efficient learning strategies than their non-ADHD peers.     

Developmental Co-ordination Disorder and Emerging Adulthood: Not Just a Motor Disorder

This paper discusses the focus of the special edition on emerging adulthood in DCD and how the different papers present the increasing awareness not only of the disorder but the continuation of difficulties into adulthood. It highlights the varying presentation at this stage and the impact these difficulties have on quality of life. Finally, it calls for further research to be undertaken to increase the understanding of DCD for both clinicians and researchers.     

The Spiral Template: The Revolution in the Evolution From Simple to Complex Systems

Change is an inborn trait of all organisms at every level of existence. This article proposes that the evolution of all life follows a course as if bound by a guiding principle or template. Overcoming disorder and entropy through diversity, this template has the properties of a spiral force, which acts to maintain continuity during change and transitions, and operates at all levels, from the simplest of forms to the most complex. Drawing from Chaos Theory, biology, depth psychology, and Buddhism, the spiral template is presented as a new vision of reality guiding scientific and spiritual perspectives toward evolutionary wholeness.     

Academic Plagiarism at the Faculty Level: Legal Versus Ethical Issues and a Case Study

Plagiarism by college and university faculty members has become a growing issue and concern in academia. This paper presents a case study of an extreme and clear case of such plagiarism. Yet an analysis of the legal and ethical contexts of such plagiarism, and the specific chronicle of this case, illustrate the complexities and difficulties in dealing with such situations. Implications for researchers, for colleges and universities, and for academic publishers and journals are offered.     

Conduct Disorder and Psychosocial Outcomes at Age 30: Early Adult Psychopathology as a Potential Mediator

Conduct disorder (CD) is associated with a number of adverse psychosocial outcomes in adulthood. There is consistent evidence that CD is predictive of antisocial behavior, but mixed evidence that CD is predictive of other externalizing and internalizing disorders. Further, externalizing and internalizing disorders are often associated with similar psychosocial outcomes as CD. However, relatively little work has examined whether forms of psychopathology (e.g., externalizing and/or internalizing disorders) mediates the relationship between youth CD and adult psychosocial outcomes. The present study examined associations between youth CD and adult psychosocial outcomes and sought to identify forms of psychopathology that may potentially mediate this relationship. Participants completed self-report measures of psychosocial functioning and semi-structured diagnostic interviews during adolescence and young adulthood. Analyses found that most domains of adult psychosocial functioning were associated with youth CD. Adult antisocial behavior was the only form of psychopathology predicted by CD. Adult antisocial behavior appeared to mediate the relationship between CD and marital status, life satisfaction, and being in jail and partially mediated the relationship between CD and family support and global functioning. These data suggest that reducing the progression to adult antisocial behavior may improve multiple psychosocial outcomes among those with a history of CD.     

Plagiarism as an illusional sense of authorship: The effect of predictability on source attribution of thought

Previous studies have shown that contextually high-predictability ideas are essential for one to sense the authorship of thoughts and that having the sense that one came up with an idea of one's own, instead of through hearing of another's idea, results in the feeling that one has output the ideas. In this study, we investigated the effects of an idea's predictability on the misattribution of another's thought to oneself. The participants were asked to write down two original ideas about how to use various objects while avoiding the duplication of another's ideas that had been presented beforehand in an input–output phase. In the monitoring phase (1 week and 1 month after the input–output phase), the participants were asked whether each idea had been generated by them, by another, or not generated at all. We found that a high-predictability idea is likely to be regarded with the notion “I generated the idea.” This tendency increased with time, suggesting that participants were more likely to have a sense of authorship when high-predictability ideas were presented. We also discovered that they were more likely to conclude that the source of high-predictability ideas was the “Self.” We discussed the results from the viewpoint of the participant's sense of agency as well.     

Plagiarism,Integrity, and Workplace Deviance: A Criterion Study

Plagiarism is increasingly evident in business and academia. Though links between demographic, personality, and situational factors have been found, previous research has not used actual plagiarism behavior as a criterion variable. Previous research on academic dishonesty has consistently used self-report measures to establish prevalence of dishonest behavior. In this study we use actual plagiarism behavior to establish its prevalence, as well as relationships between integrity-related personal selection and workplace deviance measures. This research covers new ground in two respects: (a) That the academic dishonesty literature is subject to revision using criterion variables to avoid self bias and social desirability issues and (b) we establish the relationship between actual academic dishonesty and potential workplace deviance/white-collar crime.     

Disorder as harmful dysfunction: a conceptual critique of DSM-III-R's definition of mental disorder.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (3rd ed., rev.; DSM-III-R) operationally defines disorder essentially as "statistically unexpectable distress or disability." This definition is an attempt to operationalize 2 basic principles: that a disorder is harmful and that a disorder is a dysfunction (i.e., an inability of some internal mechanism to perform its natural function). However, the definition fails to capture the idea of "dysfunction" and so fails to validly distinguish disorders from nondisorders, leading to invalidities in many of DSM-III-R's specific diagnostic criteria. These problems with validity are traced to DSM-III-R's strategies for increasing reliability.