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Academic Integrity in Higher Education: The Case of Plagiarism of Graduation Reports by Undergraduate Seniors in Vietnam

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Abstract

Plagiarism in higher education has become widespread among students in Vietnam. This paper aims to examine the seriousness of the problem by comparing the severity of plagiarism in two universities, one of which uses Turnitin software to check its student reports. For that purpose, 977 samples have been drawn from 1434 required graduation reports written by senior undergraduates in the economics and management field from 2013 to 2015. Turnitin’s “Similarity Index” (SI) was used to check for alleged plagiarism, which was found to be more widespread at the university not using Turnitin. At that university, 91.7% of the graduation reports were defined as plagiarized, while 61.7% of the reports were plagiarized at the university using the software. The main source of this problem was the use of information from the internet without citing the original authors.

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Notes

  1. http://turnitin.com/en_us/what-we-offer/faqs

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Dr. Michael J. Barnes for editing our manuscripts as well as Mr. Duong Kim Thanh and Ms. Pham Nhu Binh for helping to collect data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Economics and Management, Hoa Sen University, 8 Nguyen Van Trang, Dist.1, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

    Ut T. Tran

  2. Faculty of Economics, Thu Dau Mot University, Binh Duong Province, Vietnam

    Thanh Huynh & Hoa Thanh T. Nguyen

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  1. Ut T. Tran
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  2. Thanh Huynh
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  3. Hoa Thanh T. Nguyen
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Correspondence to Ut T. Tran.

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Tran, U.T., Huynh, T. & Nguyen, H.T.T. Academic Integrity in Higher Education: The Case of Plagiarism of Graduation Reports by Undergraduate Seniors in Vietnam. J Acad Ethics 16, 61–69 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-017-9279-9

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