Plagiarism Prevention Software For Thesis Writing: Its Advantages and the Students’ Attitudes

Abstract

One critical issue in academic writing is the originality of the works. Plagiarism, which is a violation of originality, is a complicated problem that is still committed by many scholars. The cases of plagiarism among students range from using incorrect citation into using others’ writing entirely. The scholars have taken many efforts to reduce plagiarism in their community. Definitely, the essential way to avoid plagiarism is by using proper citations and quotations. However, a common way to prevent plagiarism in this digital era is the implementation of plagiarism detection software. This paper presents the advantages of plagiarism prevention software and the students’ attitudes towards it. The students of master program, who already completed writing their theses, were interviewed about the implementation of plagiarism prevention software in the university. The result shows that using plagiarism prevention software should have benefits in developing the students’ individual skills and maintaining the academic integrity among the students. There would be two stages in dealing with plagiarism problem: the stage of reduction and the stage of prevention. Furthermore, most students showed positive attitudes towards the implementation of plagiarism prevention software in checking their theses. The software would encourage the students to be more careful in quoting and paraphrasing ideas. Some students supported the idea of implementing plagiarism detection software as a regulation. Nevertheless, they still worried if the university only considers the result of similarity detection in issuing a judgment on plagiarism in students’ theses. This study also revealed that most students were willing to revise their theses by replacing the detected similar words necessarily.

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