Abstract:

Ethical questions that entrepreneurs or employees in managerial positions must address during their professional life often have their basis in the period of their education, especially university education. The procedures, which they choose in their unethical behaviour and we shall only address written plagiarism are mostly identical; the methods or tools that may be applied to detect plagiarism are then also identical. This paper, first of all, paints a picture of the approach to plagiarism adopted by students during their tertiary education and strives to capture the shift in the perception of plagiarism that has occurred in the last few years. The aim is not to capture global trends, but to monitor and quantify the situation based on data collected from three different surveys conducted among university students. For comparison, we used a survey conducted in 2005 at the University of Virginia, USA, adopted in 2010 by the Faculty of Management, University of Economics in Prague, Czech Republic, and then repeated in an expanded version in 2015. As the results show, plagiarism as the source of documents is a serious problem, which is subsequently carried over to the working life and entrepreneurship. Combating plagiarism is difficult and the solutions proposed can only defeat a narrowly defined form of plagiarism. As in many other areas of human life, it is therefore appropriate to introduce preventive elements into the tertiary education system (especially information on how to address the issue of plagiarism) before introducing repressive measures.