Plagiarism Tendencies And Contributing Factors In E-Learning Environments: Rwandan Higher Education Context

Plagiarism has been a critical concern to consider by universities and research institutes worldwide for ensuring academic integrity. Even with the internet revolution, this academic dishonesty became increasingly overwhelming more especially due to easy access and use of online resources without acknowledging the original authors. Prior research explored several perspectives of plagiarism such as culture, language, internet technology, and policies from different institutional settings. However, little is known about plagiarism in the online Rwandan higher education context. The aim of this study is twofold. First it attempts to understand the tendencies of plagiarism through internet-based resources and then secondly to identify the contextual factors that contribute to plagiarism by students at University of Rwanda. Both undergraduate and master's dissertations were randomly collected and analysed to ascertain the frequency of plagiarism tendencies from the text-based similarity indexes. In addition, open-ended interviews were conducted to 15 teachers and 15 students from UR colleges. Similarity indexes from Turnitin's originality reports were used to determine the frequency of similarity indexes through computer-based text-matching process. Results indicated a highly critical rate of tendencies to plagiarism each referred type of plagiarism. Likewise, findings portrayed that for the sample of analysed documents, no thesis document is deemed genuine to fulfil the academic integrity. In addition, the frequency of similarity indexes of the texts matched from the analysed thesis documents and online databases is closely similar for both undergraduate and graduate students. Moreover, this study identified 17 factors contributing mostly to plagiarising through easy access to internet resources at this university. Among them, six reasons are related to social-cultural context, five to institutional context and the last six are attributed to individual factors. A holistic approach encompassing innovative, detective and preventive strategies is recommended in association with computer-supported tools to eradicate plagiarism at this institution. Further research can explore the adoption and use of computer-based text matching tools as an additional strategy for combating plagiarism in both public and private universities at national or regional level by comparing several institutions.