Writing from sources and its relationship with plagiarism in university students

Abstract

Academic writing requires the ability to identify the main ideas of sources, using an original language. One of the problems that had been identified in university students, especially in beginners, concerns the deficient way in which they write. Often, they produce texts very close to the originals, easily confounded with plagiarized texts. The main objective of the present study was to identify the strategies used by university students in a writing task. Forty-four students were asked to write a summary with the main ideas of a previously read article. Two Portuguese teachers evaluated the summaries, according to the strategies used: copy without citation; copy with citation; patchwriting; paraphrase; summary. This evaluation confirmed that students very often use copying and patchwriting, closely following the language of the original, approaching what could be classified as plagiarism. It was also detected that, very often, students change the meaning of the source. Correlations and the analysis of clusters were conducted, indicating that a large part of the students tend to adopt one of two strategies: they copy, respecting the source, or they write autonomously, but changing the ideas of what they have read. The results found allowed to conclude that our participants have many difficulties in writing, which lead us to defend the need to develop students’ writing and their identity as authors, and to argue that pedagogical responses will be the best way to combat plagiarism and an alternative to the punitive measures currently prevailing in the university context.