Problems in Students’ Academic Writings

Abstract

The students in colleges, universities and schools are given various types of academic writings like assignments, laboratory reports, project reports, essays, and many more as a part of teaching and learning. But the concern observed by many tutors are the kinds of problems that are seen in their academic writings. The main aim of the research is to evaluate and check the various common types of problems in students’ academic writings in the College of Science and Technology (CST), Royal University of Bhutan. Different journal papers were collected, read and evaluated to get the current state of the art. In CST, a survey questionnaire was formulated, added in Google form and the responses were collected from the faculties of CST.The research showed that most common types of problems seen in students’ work are plagiarism, paraphrasing, grammatical errors, spellings and punctuations. There are various reasons for having problems in students’ academic writings. The lack of not having intensive writing, time constraints, laziness and unaware of academic writing were the most common reasons stated. The result from the survey conducted in CST also showed the similar kind of problems that are seen in many of the literatures. The CST faculties recommend different solutions and suggestions to undertake so that the students’ problems in academic writings are improved drastically with minimal problems.

Keywords: Academic writing, Plagiarism, Paraphrasing, Punctuation, Grammar

DOI: 10.7176/JEP/11-18-04

Publication date:June 30th 2020