A Survey on Plagiarism in High School - Essay Example

In quota sampling, the researcher selects the respondents in a survey based on some specified characteristics, which in this case is being a high school student (Rubin & Babbie, 2010). The survey questionnaire is shown in Appendix 1. Based on the first part of the questionnaire, two-thirds of the respondents are male and the remaining one-third are females. The majority of the respondents are 18 years old (8 out of 30 or 26.67%). The 16 and 19-year-olds make up the two smallest groups at 6.67% each. The 14 and 17-year-olds each comprise 23.

33% of the respondents, while 15-year-olds account for 13.33%. Sixteen respondents or 53.33% are enrolled in public high schools, while the remaining 14, or 46.67% study in private schools. Nine or 30% of the students are sophomores, 8 or 26.67% are juniors, 7 or 23.33% are freshmen, and 6, or 20% are seniors. Nine out of every 10 students (27 out of 30 or 90%) are aware of what plagiarism is, while the rest reported that they do not understand the term plagiarism. Exactly one-third of the students admitted that they always commit acts of plagiarism, while one-quarter of the students confessed that they plagiarize frequently.

Nine out of 30 (30%) students pleaded guilty to plagiarizing only seldomly, whereas 5 (16.67%) stated that they have never committed plagiarism in connection with school work. The main reason reported by the students for committing plagiarism was that it is so easy to just copy and paste text from the internet (13 or 52%). Other reasons given were: un-awareness of the teacher regarding their practice of plagiarism (6 or 24%); everybody else is doing it (4 or 16. %) and just for the thrill of it (2 or 8%)1.

Twenty-two of the 25 respondents who had committed plagiarism or approximately 88% has never been reprimanded or given sanctions. The hypothetical question asking the respondents if they will be still tempted to commit plagiarism if they were (or will be) punished for doing it, garnered 25 or 83.33% yes answers. It was observed that those who answered in the negative were those who reported that they have never plagiarized (5 or 16.67%). Findings also revealed that those who admitted to plagiarizing for their school work did so in all the subjects except for Physical Education2.

It may be deduced from the findings that the behavior exemplified by the students who participated in the survey approximates the same characteristics as described in McCabe (2005). Like the typical high school students in McCabe (2005), the respondents in this survey do not take the perils of Internet plagiarism or the “cut and paste” mentality seriously. And this is reason enough for the academe to be seriously concerned about plagiarism among high school students. Along this line, both the McCabe (2005) study and this survey seem to agree that students do not fear being caught by their teacher because of their popular observation that most teachers lack Internet savvy to be able to detect that their submitted coursework is plagiarized.

In this regard, schools should take up the cudgels to equip teachers with the proper training on the use of the Internet and appropriate technology to detect plagiarized student work. With the fast pace at which information technology advances, teachers should always be one step ahead of their students. Teachers are the first line of defense against plagiarism, but to be efficient in this task, they have to be specially skilled to be “plagiarist-busters”.