An Analysis of plagiarism in seminar proposals by the eighth semester students of PBI at IAIN Sunan Ampel Surabaya

This study is aimed for three objectives: 1) investigate the plagiarism incidents in seminar proposals by eighth semester students of PBI at IAIN Sunan Ampel, Surabaya; 2) describe the plagiarism forms within the proposals; and 3) find out the students' perceptions regarding plagiarism. The forms of plagiarism that were used as the limitation in this study had been synthesized from some theories such as research resources at plagiarism. org, previous plagiarism study of Mulyana, and policy on plagiarism made by The university of Melbourne and Claremont Graduate University. The data were collected through document study and in-depth interview technique and analyzed using "flow model" of Matthew B. Miles and A.Michael Huberman especially descriptive qualitative method. The document study was conducted for ensuring whether any plagiarism or not in students' seminar proposals and finding out the forms of plagiarism within the proposals. There were six seminar proposals had been analyzed. While in-depth interview was aimed to find out the students' perspectives regarding plagiarism including the students understanding of plagiarism and its indicators, their opinion dealing with guiltiness of plagiarism, the difficulties in writing to avoid plagiarism and their solutions, why students plagiarized and student suggestions for course improvement. Finally, the findings show that: 1) It was proven that plagiarism really occurred in students' seminar proposals based on the result of analysis. 2) Then, there were various plagiarism forms found, consisting of duplicating title, the photocopy, the potluck paper, the ghost writer, duplicating references, paraphrase plagiarism, mosaic plagiarism, source plagiarism, the forgotten footnote, the too-perfect paraphrase, the resourceful citer, disguised source, and the misinformer. 3) From the whole responses of research problem number 3, it can be conluded that many students basically understood well about the general concept of plagiarism but they felt confused in defining the indicators of plagiarism and also how to avoid it using strategies that had ever been learned in their campus such as citation, quotation, paraphrasing, and summarizing. They commented that they were lack of those knowledge. As the consequence,they tended to take "a short cut", plagiarism, to accomplish their assignments soon.