Students’ Strategy in Avoiding Plagiarism in Academic Writing Class

This study was designed to figure out the students' strategies in avoiding plagiarism in an academic writing class, and the factors influencing the students to plagiarize in completing their assignments. The study employed a qualitative research approach aiming at getting more information and a detailed description of social or human issues (Creswell, 2009). Ten students of the English Language Education Department in the fifth semester were randomly selected as the research participants. Those selected participants were interviewed face to face ensuring that all required information was gathered in line with the main objectives of this study. Besides interviewing the students, the researcher also analyzed the students' writing. The findings of the study revealed that there are three strategies that students used to avoid plagiarism; paraphrasing and quoting others' ideas, understanding the meaning of plagiarism, and using the lectures' particular method. Furthermore, the factors influencing the students to plagiarize are limited time to work on an assignment, meeting deadline, technological development and easy to access online sources, students laziness, lack of understanding to paraphrase, and poor understanding of plagiarismact.