The Relationship between Moral Reasoning and Plagiarism in Accounting Courses: A Replication Study

We investigate the relationship between moral reasoning and plagiarism by students in accounting courses. Using the Internet tool, turnitin.com (http://www.turnitin.com), we define plagiarism as the percentage of words copied from the Internet without proper acknowledgement of the source. We use writing assignments at the beginning and the end of the semester in three undergraduate and three graduate capstone accounting courses to hypothesize and find support for a significant inverse relationship between moral reasoning, as measured by the Defining Issues Test, and plagiarism. We also find evidence of significantly more plagiarism at the end of the semester than the beginning, and an inverse relationship between plagiarism and grade point average.