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

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.A.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Teaching of English Sec Lang

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2014

Author dc:creator

• Lambert, Leyla

Contributors dc:contributor

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

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

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2014 Leyla Lambert

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

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

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/49698