Vijaya Kumar Gudep, Business and Management Studies, Skyline College, Sharjah, UAE

The present research study investigates the UAE undergraduate students’ attitude towards the issue of Internet plagiarism and tests whether there is a significant difference between the attitudes of three types of respondents chosen for this study with respect to various factors affecting Internet plagiarism. An instrument for measuring the attitudes of the students towards Internet plagiarism is developed. A research framework is constructed to extract relevant factors affecting students’ attitudes towards Internet plagiarism. The results of this survey indicated that the attitudes of students towards Internet plagiarism are reflected in terms of the six extracted factors derived from the analysis of the study. The results of the research also revealed that there is no significant difference between various student groups (respondents) considered for the present research within the selected colleges in Dubai and Sharjah with respect to the issue of Internet plagiarism. The results further demonstrated that there is no significant difference between the attitudes of male and female respondents with respect to Internet plagiarism. Suggestions are also offered to keep the widely preva-lent Internet plagiarism practices at bay among the undergraduate students in UAE.

Keywords: Internet plagiarism, World Wide Web (WWW), Principal components analysis (PCA), Varimax rotation, Eigen value and Rotated Component Matrix

Suggested citation: Gudep, V.K.(2005). Copycats thrive on the internet: a multivariate study of the attitudes of the undergraduate students in Dubai and Sharjah towards internet plagiarism. Skyline Business Journal, Volume 1, Issue 1. pp 45-52

Gudep, V.K.(2005). Copycats thrive on the internet: a multivariate study of the attitudes of the undergraduate students in Dubai and Sharjah towards internet plagiarism. Skyline Business Journal, Volume 1, Issue 1. pp 45-52