Abstract
While in the last decade there has been a growth of research on e-plagiarism in higher
education, relatively little research has been conducted in high schools, particularly with
regard to the extent to which it is being practised, its implications on assessment practice, and
the pedagogical and technical strategies used to cope with it. This paper documents the
findings of a study investigating the understanding of New Zealand high school students on
the nature and forms of plagiarism, as well as the extent to which they plagiarised. Data in
this study has been collected in two ways: (1) a questionnaire survey was administered to a
random sample of first-year university students to solicit responses on their understanding of
plagiarism when they were in high school; and (2) a content analysis of all the high schools
websites in New Zealand was undertaken to gather data on school rules and policies with
regard to e-plagiarism. Findings of this study show that the nature of plagiarism has not been
clearly understood by students, and many schools considered it primarily as a copyright issue,
with rules and regulations on plagiarism written as part of the Internet acceptable use policy.
This paper was submitted to the International Integrity & Plagiarism Conference which ran between 2004-2014. The paper was peer reviewed by an independent editorial board and features in the conference proceedings.