An Investigation of the Quality of Business Research Reports in Selected Undergraduate Degree Programs at the National Institute of Transport

Abstract

Writing a final year research project is a requirement for students to obtain a Bachelor Degree in some universities. This study engaged the quantitative approach and used documentary review method to inspect the quality of undergraduate research reports in selected programs at the NIT. Simple random sampling was used to select three programs from which; a total of 102 reports were selected. An 11 item checklist was employed to guide the analysis. The data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. Results revealed that student’s reports have cases of plagiarism, citation and referencing problems. Though all studies had research designs therein, only 4.9% could justify the choice for the selected designs. It was also observed that 59.8% (n = 61) did not identify the approach they used and students proposed significantly more methods than they actually used; t = 16.9, p = 0.000. It is concluded that the quality of students’ works leaves much to be desired and thus recommendations for action suggested.