PLAGIARISM IN ESSAY WRITING AMONG STUDENTS AT A PRIVATE UNIVERSITY IN YOGYAKARTA

Writing essay is one of the assignments in Interpretative Reading and Argumentative Writing course at English Language Department (ELED) in a private university in Yogyakarta. The students are required to write essays in that course to measure students’ writing skills. In writing essay, the students find difficulties. The difficulties can lead them to do plagiarism. This research aimed to investigate and explore the reasons why the students plagiarize. Besides, this research also aimed to find out the types of plagiarism in writing essay. This research used descriptive qualitative research design. To gather the data, the researcher used interview and document. The setting of the research was ELED at a private university in Yogyakarta. The participants were three students who were indicated in committing plagiarism in writing essay. The document used in this study was students’ essay writing. The findings showed that the causes of committing plagiarism were difficulties in discovering ideas, students’ laziness, easy access to internet, poor paraphrasing, poor academic writing, limited vocabulary, and improper time management. The type of plagiarism that was done by student in writing essay is copy paste plagiarism