Abstract:
The intent of this study was to assess the Prevalence of Plagiarisms and its implication to
quality of education: The case of Addis Ababa University. Both quantitative and
qualitative data were collected through questionnaires, interviews and participant’s
observers. A sample of eight departments was selected randomly among 40 postgraduate
studies. A sample of 163 students participated from 483 postgraduate students of regular
and extension program; besides 9 instructors were interviewed. The data were analyzed
using Percentages, means and standard deviation. The findings reveal that internet
plagiarisms and plagiarisms due poor understanding of in text citation, paraphrasing
and referencing prevail most due to intentional plagiarism act of pressure to succeed and
unintentional act of poor understanding of in text citation, paraphrasing and referencing
conventions. Further, absence of vivid and inclusive mechanisms to identify the
authenticity of students work across the selected departments show that there is a loosen
ant-plagiarism movements in the departments. Therefore, this study suggests different
recommendations and the main ones are departments and institutes should prepare
common explicit simple examples of correct text acknowledgements conventions that
could be put on the course outlines of each courses/modules; the nation higher
educations should have a hub data base and software’s that could help instructors a
cross the nation to check their students work with others prior work; student’s papers
and thesis titles have to be guided to new issues and contemporary problems of the
society to minimize replications and scrabbling on similar arena