Similarity Index Application to Students’ Projects for Quality Control

Abstract

Plagiarism is a global challenge presently facing most academic institutions. The wealth of resources on the internet through Information Technology provided unhindered access to those resources. The present trend among students is to download resources from the web and submit the same verbatim. The peak of this is downloading or copying someone else’s project/dissertation and presenting the same as the original owner. This paper proposes the introduction of Plagiarism software in all academic institutions in Nigeria for quality control and promotion of originality among students. A well-structured questionnaire was developed and administered in The Federal Polytechnic, Ilaro among 318 participants randomly selected from Higher National Diploma (HND) II students across the five (5) schools using stratified proportional allocation technique and 212 academic staff making a total of five hundred and thirty (530) participants to gather information on the perception of introducing plagiarism software in tertiary institutions for quality assurance purposes. Also, statistical analysis was carried out on randomly selected 50 samples of past HND II projects within the Department of Computer Science. Similarity test index was conducted on the selected and digitised projects. With a similarity index benchmark of ≤ 21%, the results of the analysis shows 2% project with less than 21% plagiarism, 13% project with 22-30% plagiarism, 10% with 31-40% plagiarism, 15% with 41-50% and 60% of the students’ project with over 50% plagiarism The analyses from this study confirmed the level of academic fraud being practised by the students, which should be a significant concern across Academic institutions not only in Nigeria but across the globe.