Academic and Professional Development Assignment

Academic and Professional Development - Assignment Example The paper manages to set up questionnaires that were used to capture accounting students’ attitude towards plagiarism. The questionnaires were administered to accounting students in both undergraduate and post graduate levels. The final results were then analyzed and comparisons were made (Yeo, 2007, p.12). Previous empirical studies have discovered a number of factors that relate to student plagiarism such as environmental factors, demographic variables and moral capability. However, none of the research has ever considered comprehensive factors of plagiarism (Barrett and Cox, 2005, p. 14). Most of the previous studies have often tested linear relationships between constructs instead of constructing the validity of hypothesized models. Considering the collection of data, all the previous studies sampled only undergraduate students and not post graduate students (Bornstein, 2007. p.17). This paper introduces a number of factors that have been left out in the previous empirical studies into a hypothesized model, for instance, accounting education (Bretag and Carapiet, 2007, p.19). The objectives of the paper is to identify factors that influence the plagiaristic behaviors of students, to develop and empirically test a model of factors that influence students plagiaristic behaviors and to make recommendations for accounting educators prevent student plagiarism. The paper has empirically tested and developed a model of factors that influence student plagiarism within the context of accounting education. 2. Analysis The internet is no doubt the major cause of plagiarism amongst students as the paper suggests. There internet has a lot of information that students can access without having to read a lot of books from the library. The internet has been expanding rapidly with information from a number of sources and this has facilitated plagiarism. There has also been the development of a number of online software that is used to detect plagiarism ((Sierles, Hen drickx, and Circle, 1980, p.29). Some of these online software include Turnitin and grammarly.com that are used to detect work that has been plagiarized. Approximately sixty percent of UK institutions use Turnitin to detect work that has been plagiarized. When lectures discover that students have plagiarized their work, they often penalize students. These penalizations are what make students fear plagiarizing their work. Students who intend to gain academic qualifications are expected to reveal appropriate levels of attainment and ability through examinations and coursework. This requires students to produce submissions that meet a certain assignment specification that is marked by a tutor to confirm that the work reaches the required standard. In most institutions, students are required to confirm that the submission is the result of their own work. Plagiarism may also occur when students self-plagiarize their work. Self plagiarism is usually a delicate and complex issue. Some acad emics argue that self plagiarism may not occur because plagiarism is theft and one cannot steal from himself. The major types of self plagiarism include duplicate and redundant publications, partitioning a larger sturdy into smaller published studies. The paper mentions plagiarism but fails to mention self plagiarism, which is one of the major concerns in academics. Students often plagiarize their previous works because of their laziness or to complete their work faster. The paper reviews nine factors that concern student plagiarism and these factors include demographic variables, cultural influences, institutional support, and new technology, accounting educat