Internet plagiarism among form five chemistry students of a selected secondry schools in Gombak, Selangor : a case study

Abstract

This case study was conducted to investigate the extent of Internet plagiarism among Form Five Chemistry students at a selected secondary school in Gombak. The case study looked into the amount and extent of Internet plagiarism and sought to establish whether gender, Chemistry achievement and English proficiency demonstrate statistically significant relationships with Internet plagiarism. The participants consisted of 87 Chemistry students, 36 male and 51 female. They were asked to write two-page essay on acid rain and were told that they could take information from a variety of sources including the Internet. Students’ essays on acid rain were scrutinized closely to find matching sentences with Internet sources. The amount and rate of Internet plagiarism were calculated. In order to validate the analysis, inter-rater reliability procedures were done. Descriptive statistics were used to find the amount of plagiarized text and rate of plagiarism. Independent samples t-test analysis was used to find the significant difference in the amount of Internet plagiarism between male and female students. A correlation analysis using Pearson Correlation was used to find significant relationship between students’ Chemistry achievement and English achievement with the amount of Internet plagiarism. The results show that the extent of Internet plagiarism among the Chemistry students was huge with 90.8% are considered as committing high scale plagiarism. There is no statistically significant difference between male and female students in terms of the amount of plagiarized material in the essays. The findings also indicate that the more competent the student is in Chemistry and English, the less likely he or she would plagiarize. The findings of this research serve as a guide to schools, teachers and relevant authorities in formulating strategies and policies to address the prevalence of Internet plagiarism among school students in Malaysia.