Factors Leading Academic Writing Students to Plagiarism and Their Strategies to Avoid It

Abstract

Writing an essay in an Academic Writing class is a challenge in gathering literature and providing evidence to make writing stronger. Adding supporting information in the essay is a necessary step, but this needs to be done carefully without falling into the trap of plagiarism. This study presents an investigation of the factors that led students in the Academic Writing class to plagiarism and their strategies to avoid it. There were ten participants from the 2020 class year of English Language Education Program (ELEP), Faculty Language and Arts, Universitas Kristen Satya Wacana who had taken Academic Writing class. This study reveals that there were three factors that unintentionally caused students to plagiarize: students were not being able to paraphrase properly, lack of understanding of the source texts, and students’ laziness. Furthermore, the results confirm the strategies used by participants in avoiding plagiarism. There is paraphrasing the source texts, paraphrasing using an application, synthesizing the source texts, quoting the source texts directly, using plagiarism checkers. Hopefully, this study can make Academic Writing students be more aware of plagiarism. In addition, it is hoped that the results of the research can be useful for Academic Writing students to use appropriate strategies in reducing plagiarism.