This study investigates the reliability of plagiarism measurement in the ESL essay writing context. The current study aims to address the answers to the following research questions: 1) How does plagiarism measurement affect test reliability in a psychometric view? and 2) how do raters conceive the plagiarism in their analytic scoring? This study uses the mixed-methodology that crosses quantitative-qualitative techniques. Thirty eight international students took an ESL placement writing test offered by the University of Illinois. Two native expert raters rated students' essays in terms of 5 analytic features (organization, content, language use, source use, plagiarism) and made a holistic score using a scoring benchmark. For research question 1, the current study, using G-theory and Multi-facet Rasch model, found that plagiarism measurement threatened test reliability. For research question 2, two native raters and one non-native rater in their email correspondences responded that plagiarism was not a valid analytic area to be measured in a large-scale writing test. They viewed the plagiarism as a difficult measurement are. In conclusion, this study proposes that a systematic training program for avoiding plagiarism should be given to students. In addition, this study suggested that plagiarism is measured reliably in the small-scale classroom test.