Character Education Models to Develop Anti-Plagiarism Behavior among Students in the Faculty of Engineering

This study aims at examining the effect of character education models to avoid students' plagiarism behaviour. The authors used a quantitative research with the pre-experimental design. The study involved fifty students from the Faculty of Engineering at the Universitas Negeri Makassar selected by random sampling technique. Moreover, the authors conducted Focus Group Discussion (FGD) as a treatment to support this study. Quantitative data were analysed using a t-test to find out the mean scores between pretest and posttest. The results showed an improvement in the average score of avoiding plagiarism before and after the treatment through improvement in character education. Focus group discussion results also revealed that students were very enthusiastic about character education model that was trained. The participants were considered to be helped regarding avoiding plagiarism. Therefore, the students feel more confident in doing a writing assignment. The authors recommend implementing character education model officially for a first-year student at higher education. Further research is expected to involve a large-scale population to investigate the effectiveness effort in avoiding plagiarism behaviour.