The present study investigated undergraduate students’ perceptions toward plagiarism and undergraduate students’ strategies to prevent plagiarism in academic writing class. First, the researcher wanted to find out more about the students’ perception of plagiarism and whether they thought plagiarism was good or bad in academic writing. Second, from the results of students’ perceptions, the researcher wanted to explore whether their perceptions were in line with their strategies for avoiding plagiarism or not.
For this research, the researcher used a case study as the research design. The researcher researched with the fifth-semester students as participants. The data was collected with a questionnaire and interview. First, the researcher conducted the questionnaire to select the students who had the same concept of plagiarism as the research. Then, nine students who had the same concept of plagiarism with the study were chosen to be interviewed. After getting the data from participants, the researcher analyzed the data with the interactive model proposed by Miles, Huberman, and Saldana (2014).
The results of this study showed that students had the same perception of plagiarism. They believed that plagiarism was unacceptable and illegal. They considered plagiarism was wrong and bad because it took someone’s ideas or works without citing the source and recognized them as his own. Therefore, students used quotation marks for direct quotations, cited the sources, and paraphrased the sources to avoid plagiarism. The students paraphrased more often when they found the sources. However, the students misunderstood with paraphrasing by changing the word choice and grammar. They did not consider it as plagiarism.
This research may help future researchers use this research to present a description for future L2 plagiarism studies. It enables future researchers to conduct a similar study with more profound information and more significant participants. The researcher hopes that students learn more profound knowledge about plagiarism when writing academic text to improve their quality in writing. The lecturer may develop their material to teach the students about plagiarism.
