University student plagiarism behavior and the role of plagiarism detection tools

This study aims to identify university students’ plagiarism comprehension and to pinpoint academic activity that could potentially lead to plagiarism behavior. The study has also attempted to examine the implementation of plagiarism detection tools by students. The subject of study consist of university students participated in survey study (105 students) and the examination of the academic activity records (30 students). The results show that majority of students have conducted paraphrase occasionally to adapt the information from the original sources. Moreover, the results show that students are accurately referencing their sources and giving credit to the original author. However, some students still demonstrate plagiarism behavior, as indicated by the plagiarism index results, where 16 out of 30 student article assignments did not meet the benchmark index. The findings indicate that students’ understanding of plagiarism is at an average level. The findings lso show that the majority of students are already using plagiarism detection tools, particularly paid plagiarism detection software. The majority of students employed this plagiarism detection tools as part of their daily assignments, reports, theses, and scientific articles. The existence of plagiarism detection tools leads to increased awareness of plagiarism in educational environments.