December 30, 2007

PLAGIARISM is a complex concept to define as it incorporates a diverse range of actions from merely replacing words in an already published or submitted manuscript using a word processor’s thesaurus to the overall theft of someone else’s intellectual effort. ‘New frontiers in cheating’, an article in Britannica Book of the Year 2003 defined this concept as “an act of taking the writings of another person and passing them off as one’s own”. It further presented plagiarism as a “fraudulence closely related to forgery or piracy.” However it annulled the presentation of duplicated thoughts expressed in different words as an act of plagiarism.

Extending this definition of plagiarism, student plagiarism can be further defined as plagiarism with the intent of gaining academic credit. Lathrop, Ann, and Kathleen Foss in their work Student Cheating and Plagiarism in the Internet Era: A Wake-Up Call (2000) cited student plagiarism as of two types — Deliberate plagiarism and Unintentional plagiarism. Deliberate plagiarism refers to the “wholesale copying of another’s paper with the intention of representing it as one’s own” and the unintentional kind of plagiarism refers to “careless paraphrasing and citing of the source material so that improper or misleading credit is given”. This article is aimed at examining issues related to student plagiarism and its adverse affects on delivering quality education. It also looks at the way by which student plagiarism could be combated.

Most of the students pursuing higher academic qualifications plagiarise deliberately due to lack of skills in finding and evaluating secondary data, problems in ascertaining internet sources, unrealistic deadlines, lack of teamwork, lack of faculty concentration, improper penalties on detected cases of plagiarism and inadequate guidelines for completion of assignments or projects. The continuously increasing amount of information on the web and the accessibility to this information has further aggravated the issue of student plagiarism.

Albeit the initiatives of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) in Pakistan, various sources of secondary data have been made available to the students but either they are ignorant of these sources or they happen to be novice users. Many undergraduate students still do not know anything about exploring databases for journal articles or using the library catalogue for reference literature.

As a faculty member of some leading institutions in Pakistan, including the University of the Punjab, I have often observed that students, generally, are reluctant to use library catalogues, giving preference to Internet sources. Although, it is perfectly acceptable to use Internet sources too, the practice of copy or cut and paste is keeping students from using their own problem solving skills.

It has been seen that students at both the under-graduate and post-graduate levels are also ignorant to the ways of accessing accurate information online. Free web hosting and cheap web servers these days have enabled everyone to publish material on the web. There is no quality control. One can only rely on personal judgment or the popularity of the web publisher in order to validate the content of the material. For instance, one can always count on the Harvard Business Review website when working on a business communication or marketing assignment or anything else related to business studies. The widely accepted parameters to be considered when assessing web content are authorship, publishing body, point of view or bias, referral to other sources, verifiability and currency (which refers to the timeliness of a web document).

Another reason for student plagiarism is unrealistic deadlines for the completion of coursework exercises. Deadlines are usually given at random without assessing the student’s workload during a semester. This provokes students into plagiarising instead of producing original work.

In case of group assignments or projects, it has been commonly observed that despite forming a formal group, students do not usually work coherently with just one or two of them becoming active members while the others rely on their work. Students have also adopted the self-determined ritual of dividing work in accordance with the number of courses they are studying in a semester. For instance, if there are five members in a group, one may develop the coursework exercise of financial accounting, another might work on business communication, with someone else finishing the management project. Hence all the members would be working separately on different coursework exercises, thus demolishing the original essence of group tasks and further invoking student plagiarism.

One of the most important reasons for student plagiarism is the lack of faculty concentration in coursework exercises. In most higher educational institutions of Pakistan, the prevalent workload for one faculty member is four courses/sections per semester. On average, there are 30 students studying in one course/section. This leads to the estimate that on average the cardinality is one faculty member to 120 students per semester. Apart from this, many faculty members, on an average, are teaching two visiting courses, which is an additional 60 students. Even if a faculty member spends 15 minutes per student on one coursework exercise, it will make a total of 40 hours assistance and evaluation on one coursework exercise, which is equivalent to 26 additional lecture sessions of 1.5 hour each.

Presently, the most important responsibility a faculty member performs is classroom teaching. But classroom teaching in the semester system is only one third of the overall activities being performed. In the absence of coursework exercise guidelines that should be issued by the faculty, a student may find it difficult to avoid plagiarism.

It is important to understand that plagiarism is difficult to be detected, but easy to be prevented provided both the faculty and administration of an institution imparting higher education are poised towards the creation of a learning centric environment. It is a serious academic problem. Institutions need to tackle it rather urgently with an anti-plagiarism policy, which needs to be pro-active. Standards across the higher education sector need a kind of uniformity, which may shrink profits for newly established institutions in the short term, but will prove lucrative in the long term.

The writer is assistant professor and in charge of academics at Dadabhoy Institute of Higher Education

The following measures can be taken for creating such an environment:

Tutorial sessions for navigating the library

As has already been discussed, one cause leading to student plagiarism is ignorance on the student’s part in navigating library catalogues. Librarians in association with the course instructors can play an active role in conducting such sessions. Librarians at present only play a passive role by just limiting themselves to maintaining the library catalogue and library resources. Higher educational institutions should also take steps to develop cyber libraries in addition to the traditional ones.

Instructional sessions for citing references

Duplicate thoughts expressed in one’s own words cannot be treated as acts of plagiarism. However, it is important that acknowledgement be given to the thoughts, words and ideas of others. Citing references can prevent unintentional plagiarism. There are different styles for citing references — ACS, AIM, AIP, the APA, ASA and MLA citation format, and the Harvard system of referencing. Instructors should explain to their students how to use these citation formats when giving an assignment or project.

Mindless coursework exercises

These are exercises, which have no context to the contents of the course. For instance, asking students to interview project managers of software houses can be a mindless exercise in data structure. The exercise would rather suit software engineering. Such exercises, it has been observed, invite plagiarism.

Realistic deadlines

Instructors should award realistic deadlines for submission of coursework exercises. The deadline should take into account:

• Scope of assignment/project

• Total workload of student in a semester

• Span between deadline and examination schedule

• Deadlines of assignments/projects of other courses

• Special needs of students with disabilities

It would be more appropriate, if a separate assignments and project coordination department with the objective of assignments and project submissions is established. Instructors could then coordinate with the department before giving any new coursework exercise.

Reduced workload for instructors

It is important for higher educational institutions to reduce the teaching workload from four courses/sections per semester to two per semester. In addition to this, it is important for instructors to also not take such flexibility as an opportunity for increasing their visiting workload, thus increasing their visiting remunerations.

Detailed guidelines for the completion of assignments and projects

Instructors should provide a complete guideline for the completion of assignments and projects to their students rather than giving them one-sentence questions or statements. Such guidelines may contain:

• Objective of the assignment/project

• Problem description

• Tools required

• Examples of reference text/online sources

• Reference citing format

• Evaluation criteria

• Modular decomposition of assignment/project

Continuous feedback from students

Rather than interacting with the students at the time of submission of assignments/projects, instructors should be periodically interacting with the students during the completion tenure of the work given. This will have a two-pronged effect — the instructor will be able to provide direction to the students in finding solutions as well as assess the existence of any sort of plagiarism.

Penalties

Rigorous penalties should be imposed on detected cases of student plagiarism, ranging from written warnings to exclusion from the institution based upon the number of times the offence is repeated. Penalties should not only be treated as part of the institutional calendar. They should be strictly enforced in presence of the fact that a learning centric environment was made available to the student. n