There are many strategies of avoiding plagiarism in academic writing, paraphrase is the most important one. Students often struggle hard with paraphrasing their citation properly and effectively. Furthermore, to address these challenges it is important for student to apply some strategies of paraphrase in their writing. The objectives of this research is to describe the paraphrasing strategies applied by students as well as the the most frequently strategies in thesis. This study uses qualitative research that examines 30 paraphrase from three thesis of first exemplary students English Education Study Program Universitas Muhammadiyah Kotabumi who graduated in 2021-2023. The category of paraphrasing strategies from Pietrick in Injai were used in this study as well as instruments for collecting data. The instrument used was document analysis. Data analysis was carried out in several stages; identifying data, finding the original source of data, analyzing the data, and interpreting the data. The findings show that there are three paraphrasing strategies applied in students theses. The three strategies were changing the structure and grammar of original text, changing the word of original text, and changing the structure of ideas. The researcher also found two combination strategies used by students, namely; changing the structure and grammar of original text and changing the word of original text, and also changing the word of original text and changing the structure of ideas. Then, of the five strategies, changing the word of original text is the most frequently strategies applied by students.