Friday September 18, 2009
Declare war on university students who plagiarise
AN EXPERT in academic integrity, Prof Donald McCabe, did a study at nine US state universities and found that 70% of students cheated on exams and 84% on assignments and 52% plagiarised from the Internet.
Another study by Duke University (reported in The Star, Oct 2, 2006) found the percentage of students confessing to cheating to be 56% for MBA, 54% for engineering, and 45% for law.
And about 85% of university students felt they needed to cheat to excel.
The statistics are alarming considering that the confessions are made by students who are honest about their dishonesty, and it would be even more alarming if we add the students who are dishonest about their dishonesty.
We must declare a war on this global deterioration of academic integrity to prevent our universities from producing fleets of plagiarising graduates.
Many people with authority have talked about combating this plague but not much is done. One easy and effective method to catch plagiarised work is by using the same tool the students use to cheat – the Internet.
What I do is simply copy and paste the students’ sentences in Google, and the search engine might show the genuine source of the sentences in the first few Internet hits.
There was one time I caught 80% of my students submitting plagiarised work. There are websites that offer anti-plagiarism services – such as Turnitin.com, mydropbox.com and SafeAssign.com – that compare students’ assignments with millions of assignments in their databases.
Another approach is to install a signal scrambler that scrambles several common communicating frequencies of wireless communications gadgets.
We need to include academic integrity elements in course syllabi to educate people on plagiarism and start postgraduate research on anti-plagiarism gadgetry.
Dr S.M.,
George Town.
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