UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS’ UNDERSTANDING ON PLAGIARISM IN ACADEMIC WRITING

Abstract

Plagiarism has been frequently found in academic writing produced by EFL learn­ers, including in Indonesia. It has been claimed that plagiarism is motivated by poor understanding of plagiarism. This paper is intended to find out to what ex­tent the EFL students in Indonesia understand what constitutes plagiarism. To collect the data, the EFL students at state universities in Banda Aceh who were writing their undergraduate dissertation or proposal for the dissertation were given a set of questionnaire about plagiarizing activities and they were asked to mark the activities as plagiarism and not plagiarism. 34 EFL students were selected by using convenience sampling technique. The data from the questionnaire were analyzed to find out the percentage of students who considered plagiary acts as not plagiarism. The analysis results showed that almost all students (97.70%) were well-informed that exact copying from a source without citation is plagiarism. However, 52.87% of the students were not aware that paraphrasing from source without citation constitutes plagiarism. More surprisingly, 76.86% of the students considered patch writing with citation are not plagiarism. In addition, 60.30% of the students have not been exposed to the concept of self-plagiarism. These findings suggest that students' knowledge on the concept of plagiarism was very poor. Therefore, it is advised that academic writing courses offered in EFL program be revised to cover plagiarism in more detail.

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