Students' Awareness towards the act of Plagiarism in Academic Writing among ESL undergraduates in a Malaysian Private University

Abstract

The act of plagiarism is commonly exercised among students especially in the tertiary education scene. With the current advancement of technology, the act of plagiarism is quite evident as students are able to acquire someone’s work and claiming it as theirs easily. The long-term effect of this issue is quite worrying as it will affect the quality of the graduates we are producing specifically when it comes to their academic integrity. Hence, the purpose of this study is to investigate ESL undergraduates’ awareness towards the act of plagiarism in their academic writing. A questionnaire on student’s plagiarism awareness was adopted to elicit data in order to explore this matter further in the context of Malaysian private university’s students. A total of 104 undergraduates underwent academic writing class participated in the survey. The results showed that in general, the students were aware and did have knowledge regarding both concepts of plagiarism and the characteristics of such act. Due to the awareness, the results also showed that more than half of the respondents claimed to not commit plagiarism when they write for their academic materials. The current study also looked into the relationship between gender and the frequency of plagiarism act and the findings revealed that the relationship was not statistically significant. The implication of this study could be used to help the university in getting better insight to prevent plagiarism hence promoting zero plagiarism culture among the undergraduates.