Exploring Vietnamese students’ plagiarism awareness and actual practices through using of ChatGPT as a learning tool

The emergence of ChatGPT brings about many benefits for students’ learning. However, students’ reliance on ChatGPT for educational purposes has raised concerns about potential plagiarism. Although plagiarism has been extensively researched, there is a lack of empirical evidence on students’ awareness of plagiarism, citation and reference guidelines when they utilize the output generated by ChatGPT for educational purposes. Questionnaire results from a higher education institution in Vietnam indicated that 85.6% of the participants possessed a good understanding of plagiarism and 61.3% of the students were aware of the citation and reference guidelines. Besides, their use of the ChatGPT-generated output varied, ranging from acknowledging to completely hiding its contribution. In an embedded qualitative phase, interviews with 15 participants provided deeper understandings of students’ awareness of plagiarism, citation and referencing guidelines and factors influencing their use of ChatGPT output. The behaviors were shaped not only by differing conceptualization of plagiarism in an AI-mediated learning environment and time constraints, but also students’ concerns about how teachers would evaluate their work. Based on the findings, the study offers recommendations to foster transparent and effective use of ChatGPT for learning with a focus on academic integrity, AI literacy and culturally adapted teaching and assessment strategies in Vietnamese higher education.