Understanding plagiarism in Indonesia from the lens of plagiarism policy: lessons for universities

Plagiarism is viewed as a critical issue that can hinder the development of creativity and innovation in Indonesia. Thus, since the early 2000s the Indonesian government has endeavoured to develop policies to address this issue. In response to national policy, Indonesian educational institutions have made serious institutional efforts to address the plagiarism issue. Research in the Indonesian Higher education context on plagiarism has focussed on reporting prevention and mitigation efforts. However, little has been discussed about the communication of these efforts in policy across the different institutional levels of Indonesian Higher Education. This study aims at exploring the anti-plagiarism efforts by determining the main features (or discourses) reflected in plagiarism policy in Indonesian HE from national to institutional level. Two web-based resources namely the official website of The General Directorate of Research, Technology and Higher Education (retrieved 2015), and the website of Bandung Institute of Technology (retrieved 2015) were used to ascertain the most appropriate policies to include in the study. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) was used to reach explanatory understanding of how the policies (discursive events) demonstrate through their linguistic repetitions and other forms intertextuality, their relative positions within the Indonesian Higher Education institutional hierarchy and consequently provide some insight into the social practices and understandings of plagiarism underlying the creation of the documents. This study revealed that perhaps because of the rigid boundaries and hierarchies represented between the documents, the university policy does not show much transformation from the documents at a Ministry level, hence the definition of plagiarism remains broad and the levels of plagiarism and sanctions for plagiarism remain undefined. This can potentially lead to inconsistencies in developing effective practices preventing plagiarism.