Awareness of plagiarism and ways to avoid it among students and teacher

Abstract

Plagiarism is the act of utilizing someone else's words, ideas, or works without citing the author in order to create misleading or incorrect assumptions about where the ideas, concepts, or works came from. It also includes using someone else's work without giving the author's name. The objectives of this study were to know the students and educators’ awareness of plagiarism in research and to investigate their ways to avoid plagiarism. Twenty EFL undergraduate students in the sixth semester at a university in Medan and ten educators took part in this study using a qualitative case study approach. Six statements on questionnaires with the options strongly agreed, agreed, neutral, disagreed, and strongly disagree, as well as a semi-structured interview with four students who volunteered to participate, were used to gather the data. The findings indicated that both students and educators have an awareness of plagiarism in writing a research article. They also have their own ways to avoid the occurrence of plagiarism in writing, such as paraphrasing, citing and quoting.