Academic Cyberplagiarism as a Practice of Dishonesty in Engineering Students

This article examines academic cyberplagiarism as a form of dishonesty among engineering students, integrating historical, theoretical, and practical perspectives. Despite changes in its discursive representation, plagiarism continues to be regarded as both a moral and legal infraction. A non-experimental, quantitative, cross-sectional research design was employed. The study sample consisted of 360 engineering students, along with 200 academic papers reviewed for evidence of cyberplagiarism. The findings reveal that most students engage in practices such as downloading complete papers, copying paragraphs, or removing citations, primarily driven by lack of time and the pursuit of higher grades. The results also indicate a prevailing belief that all online content is freely available for use. Notably, 92\% of the reviewed works lacked proper bibliographies and contained fragments of digital documents.