Plagiarism is considered one of the writing difficulties and has been a topic among researchers in the past ten years. Many studies explored plagiarism perceptions, the reasons behind it and the association between the elements that might contribute to plagiarism such as writing skills, language level, studying behaviour, etc. This study aimed to find out whether there is any relationship between plagiarism awareness and academic writing ability towards the students’ actual plagiarism practice by looking at their plagiarism rate.
This study used a quantitative-correlational design with the Pearson correlation and Multiple regression statistical equations to analyze and interpret the
data. The population are the English Department students at Mulawarman University who have written a Mini Research Proposal. The sample was selected by the students’ availability to be studied which consists of 30 students from batch
2016 and batch 2017. The instruments that were used are a plagiarism awareness questionnaire, Transparent Academic Writing Rubric and two reliable plagiarism detectors namely Quetext and Turnitin.
The three main findings of this study are taken from the hypothesis testing results. First, the Pearson correlation computation between plagiarism awareness (X1) and plagiarism rate (Y) result shows that there was no significant correlation between the X1 and Y. It means by only having high or low awareness towards plagiarism does not necessarily mean the students’ plagiarism rate will be higher or lower. The second finding is there was a significant negative correlation between Academic writing ability (X2) and plagiarism rate (Y) which means the higher the students’ academic writing ability, the lower the detected plagiarism rate in their papers and vice versa. Finally, the multiple regression analysis results show that there was a simultaneous significant relationship between Plagiarism awareness (X1) and Academic writing ability (X2) towards plagiarism rate (Y). The strength of the relationship is categorized as low. Both predictor variables influenced
plagiarism rate as much as 24.8%. The other 75.2% is influenced by other factors that were not included in this study. Additionally, academic writing ability has a more significant influence on plagiarism rate than plagiarism awareness.