Inoculating against Students Plagiarism: The Role of Turnitin

Abstract

This paper was conducted to examine the awareness, thoughts and practices of plagiarism among both undergraduates and graduate students in the Kumasi Metropolis of Ghana. Moreover, students' knowledge on Turnitin also formed an integral part of this study. The study adopted mixed method descriptive research design. Overall, 200 questionnaires were distributed to the respondents. Convenience sampling technique was employed to select all the respondents. Both primary and secondary data were used in this study. The survey questionnaires were adopted from Batane (2010) who had conducted similar study in Botswana. The field data were analyzed using statistical package for social scientist (SPSS) and Microsoft excel. The survey discovered that majority (82.7%) of the respondents' belief in the efficacy of turn-it-in. They asserted that turn-it-in can be used as a tool to check plagiarism among students with the least (17.3%) said otherwise. Following turn-it-in adoption 86.5% of the student are most likely to put a stop to plagiarism knowing that their papers would be checked for plagiarism through  turn-it-in. Respondents indicated reasons towards plagiarism as follows: Majority (30.3%) are most likely to plagiarize due to laziness, 23.2% will plagiarize due to procrastination and poor time management, 16.7% will again plagiarize due to lacking of the requisite skills to cite and reference, whereas 10.3% of the respondents are likely to plagiarize owing to lack of materials on plagiarism. Regarding the available policy on plagiarism, majority (33.5%) argued that policy on plagiarism only affects students when some lecturers are victims.