https://doi.10.30874/ksshr.41 1/4 Investigating the Plagiarism Awareness among Malaysian undergraduates in Summative Assessment Najihah Mahmud 1 , Nazirah Mahmud 2 , Ariezal Afzan Hassan 3 , & Nor Hazwani Munirah Lateh 4 {najihah.m@umk.edu.my 1 , nazeerah@usas.edu.my 2 , ariezal@umk.edu.my 3 , hazwani.l@umk.edu.my 4 } Universiti Malaysia Kelantan, 16300 Bachok Kelantan, Malaysia 1,3,4 , Universiti Sultan Azlan Shah, 33000 Kuala Kangsar Perak, Malaysia 2 Abstract. This preliminary study explored the level of plagiarism awareness among Malaysian undergraduates when carrying out their summative assessment. In the field of language assessment, summative assessment in the form of graded task is regarded as an effective tool to exercise change as it could highly influence the teaching and learning. However, concern regarding students’ plagiarism behaviour is increasing despite the exposure given to them by their respective instructors. Therefore, this study aimed to fill this gap by investigating if there was any relationship between the students’ perceived plagiarism awareness with their Turnitin similarity index score of their summative assessments. The graded task under investigation was in the form of argumentative essay. Using a quantitative approach, student questionnaire and document analysis were utilised to elicit data from 30 undergraduates. It was found that although the students appeared to be aware of plagiarism, their practices in their summative assessment indicated otherwise. Keywords: plagiarism, awareness, Turnitin, summative assessment, writing 1 Introduction In tertiary education, plagiarism is, without doubt, an unavoidable issue both among the lecturers and the students. It is even more severe when it comes to graded assessment especially course assignments. This could be attributed to the easy accessibility of vast amount of information and resources both online and offline. In this study, plagiarism is defined as “the action or practice of taking someone else’s work, ideas, etc., and passing it off as one’s own; ie literary theft” [1]. According to an author [2] 15 years ago, there was a steady increase of academic dishonesty and plagiarism in universities around the world and in 2020, this issue is progressing at an alarming rate. Due to the advancement of technology and Industrial Revolution 4.0, more and more technology has been injected into the teaching and learning system, making it easy for learners to transfer information from the world wide web into their graded assignments without properly citing the work. Some were aware of their plagiarism behaviour whilst some appeared to be rather ignorant about it. In a study on awareness about plagiarism amongst university students in Pakistan [3], it was reported that quite a large number of university students simply did not know what plagiarism actually mean. Even if they did know the definition of plagiarism, they