Student plagiarism and faculty responsibility in undergraduate engineering labs

Abstract

In undergraduate engineering labs, lab reports are routinely copied. By ignoring this form of plagiarism, teaching assistants and lab technicians neglect their role responsibility. By designing courses that facilitate it, however inadvertently, professors neglect their causal responsibility. Using the case of one university, we show via interviews and observation that such routine copying and faculty negligence are rampant. We suggest the latter be explicitly recognized as a cause of student dishonesty, and argue that it must be rectified before faculty earn the right to reform students. We also suggest that these findings are representative of, and therefore generalizable to, many universities’ undergraduate engineering and science labs.