Researching Plagiarism in Higher Education – Case of First-Year Students at Selected HEIs

The fast development of the Internet provided students with easy access to the abundance of electronic resources for academic writing, thus increasing the chances of plagiarism. Therefore, the awareness of the importance of academic integrity should be developed from an early stage of education. By the time students enrol into a university, they should be aware that plagiarism, as an element of academic dishonesty, is a serious issue at all levels of education. The aim of this paper is to investigate the level of students' awareness of academic dishonesty. Firstyear students at two institutions at the University of Split were given a questionnaire to assess their attitudes, beliefs and practices related to academic dishonesty. The paper reveals how often students resort to plagiarism, what resources they mainly use, and what reasons they consider acceptable for plagiarism. Finally, it is suggested that students' acquisition of academic writing skills should be improved since many of them plagiarize because they are not familiar with citing or paraphrasing nor are they aware that plagiarism is not acceptable.