Ethical Use of Information – How University Students Fare

Abstract

Ethical use of information is an important component of information literacy, particularly among university students. This paper reports on the finding of a study conducted among university students to identify their information literacy (IL) competency, with specific attention on “Ethical use of information”. The study used a self-administered questionnaire as the instrument for data collection. Respondents were 1,100 final year students from various disciplines from 4 public and 2 private universities in the Klang Valley of Malaysia. The level of competency was measured by students’ ability to identify 3 main things: a) which types of information use require users to acknowledge the information sources, b) which activities are considered plagiarism, and c) which types of information are considered copyrighted. Students need to answer13 item questions. Each answer was assigned scores for the purpose of computing competency levels, namely: 0=wrong answer, 1=beginner, 2=intermediate, 3=advanced. Results of the analysis revealed that majority of the respondents’ competency fall under the beginner level (43.4%), followed by the intermediate level (38.0%), and advanced level (18.6%). Other interesting results are obtained by cross-tabulating competency data against various characteristics, such as their information-related activities in the library, the nature of academic assignments, the type of information skills course they have attended, the university where they attended, and other demographic variables. Implications from findings are discussed.