INVESTIGATION OF ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE (EFL) STUDENTS’

PERCEPTION ON PLAGIARISM IN AN ONLINE WORLD

Background
Nowadays, higher education may be harmful from academic misconduct, including
plagiarism due to rapid information on the internet. Plagiarism can harm the academic field since
it is made without giving the citation or references. Plagiarism means using someone’s work (idea)
without giving the credit, quotation marks, cited the source, or paraphrased the idea (Davis, 2015).
Therefore, the students that plagiarize on their assignment cannot pass the course.
Due to the emergence of technology, plagiarism has been potentially easy to be committed
by the students. Manalu (2013) asserts that technology may help the act as many scientific papers
and articles are online nowadays. In the scientific field, plagiarism often occurs in scientific work
in articles form. The plagiarism that is done includes taking people’s idea as the writer own ideas,
failing to put quotation, and copying so many words without putting the source. Those happen as
the Internet provides everything, including articles that are needed by the students. As it becomes
easier for the students in doing plagiarism, it becomes a common thing in academic field of higher
education.
Technology supports the increasing plagiarism problem in university (Park, 2003). He
estimated over 50 percent of the university students that did cheat on plagiarism. One major cause
is due to ease of access in the online world. Online plagiarism through the Internet is commonplace.
This is supported by a survey conducted by Scanlon and Neumann (2002) cited in Roberts (2008)
showing that 25 percent of 700 undergraduate students had committed online plagiarism, like cut
and paste without citation. Furthermore, McCabe (2003) added that about 36 percent from 35,000
students in the academic year 2002/2003 in U.S. and Canada conducted online plagiarism from
Internet sources.
Plagiarism becomes a global issue in education. This is supported with the study that was
conducted by Hu and Lei (2012) who found that in China, the plagiarism studies are commonplace
and widespread. Other studies were also conducted in some parts of world, such as in North
America (McCabe, 2005), United Kingdom (Selwyn, 2008), and in Australia (Brimble &
Stevenson-Clarke, 2005). The studies revealed similar issues that plagiarism became a serious
problem in University today. The students who do plagiarism claim others’ work as their own
work. In addition, Underwood and Szabo (2003) found that students who admit to reproducing
ideas or word from others in assignment were more than 30 percent and up to 20 percent did it in
the text.
Plagiarism can lead students to the misbehavior in academic attitude, where the students
only cut and paste the idea and make it as their own. It is so easy and students will not need hard
work to do their assignments. Therefore, plagiarism leads students to have undesirable attitude. As
Walker (2010) stated that student plagiarism is a cheating behavior. Interestingly, plagiarism
comes from Latin word ‘plagiarus’ which the meaning is kidnapper. It is said to someone that uses
someone’s work as theirs in academic field. The cross-cultural study that was done in Asia found
that Asian university students tend to have more plagiarism attitude than Western university
students (Egan, 2008). This showed that Asian students have something to do in academic
misconduct.
There are some reasons why students do plagiarism. Ali, Ismail, and Cheat (2012)
mentioned that self-realization, ethics and personal attitude, internet access, pressure and learning
environment are reasons to plagiarize for EFL students. Manalu (2013) supported this idea by
stating five major reasons of students’ plagiarism. They include 1) students’ motive to finish their
assignments instantly, 2) students’ lacks of originalities in ideas, 3) students’ abilities in writing
are also major reasons for students’ plagiarism, 4) students’ deadline habit, and 5) students’
ignorance of quality in writing composition. Particularly in the Indonesian context, Mustafa (2016)
emphasized the students’ lacks of abilities in acknowledging others’ ideas as the major cause of
plagiarism.
There are lots of research about plagiarism in many countries. Unfortunately, empirical
evidences about plagiarism in Indonesia is very limited, especially about plagiarism perception.
That is why, there is an urgency to conduct the research about plagiarism perception in Indonesia,
especially in Bali in higher education.