Occurrence of plagiarism in the writing of international graduate business students and its detection by SafeAssign

Lambert, Leyla

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/49698 Copy

Description

Title

Occurrence of plagiarism in the writing of international graduate business students and its detection by SafeAssign

Author(s)

Lambert, Leyla

Issue Date

2014-05-30T17:05:23Z

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

• Sadler, Randall W.
• Markee, Numa P.

Department of Study

Linguistics

Discipline

Teaching of English Sec Lang

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

M.A.

Degree Level

Thesis

Keyword(s)

• English as a second language (ESL) writing
• plagiarism
• SafeAssign

Abstract

The study investigates instances of plagiarism in essays of 23 international business students written for an ESL business communication course. The students’ papers were checked for plagiarism manually and by SafeAssign, a plagiarism detection platform within Blackboard’s compass2g. The findings indicate that the two most common types of plagiarism in international students’ writing are verbatim copying from sources and inappropriate paraphrase. Students also experienced significant challenges in following APA style conventions and made errors in punctuation and sentence structure when formatting in-text citations. An analysis of SafeAssign reports indicates that the percentage of matching text is not a reliable indicator of plagiarism. SafeAssign showed a high percentage (at least 55%) of false positive plagiarism detection with references, titles, date/time and formulaic language flagged as potential plagiarism. SafeAssign performed best at identifying matches between student papers, inconsistently detected verbatim copying from sources and failed to detect inappropriate paraphrases.

Graduation Semester

2014-05

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/49698

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2014 Leyla Lambert

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