FILE PHOTO: ChatGPT logo is seen in this illustration taken, February 3, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
KLANG: Academics are constantly on the lookout for undergraduates who plagiarise their work and assignments by fishing for content on the Internet.
Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) medical faculty dean Prof Dr Zamberi Sekawi said academics are extra cautious now that there is also ChatGPT that can aid in plagiarism.
"So, we look out for any red flags. Sometimes, when we are reading work that has been submitted, our gut feeling will tell us that it has been plagiarised.
"We know our students well, and sometimes if the language is too good and if the work of several students has the same ring to it, we know that we are looking at plagiarism," added Dr Zamberi.
He said his faculty has zero tolerance for plagiarism.
According to Dr Zamberi, the university uses hi-tech software to detect plagiarism.
"This software will lead us to the original source from where the content had been lifted from."
Prof Zamberi said several students have been caught for plagiarism with the use of the software.
He added since it is a serious matter, a student will be called in for an internal inquiry before action is initiated against the person.
Usually, if it is the first offence and he has confessed, we let them off with a warning.
"But if it is repeated, we will fail the students for the entire subject that has been plagiarised," he added.
An academic from a public university who declined to be named said most universities run everything handed in by students, including articles for journals, through software to detect plagiarism.
However, he added, some students were also "smart" enough to check lifted information with free online apps to escape plagiarism detection.
"These students use the Internet to find out how to plagiarise without being caught," he said.He said that, for example, asking one question at ChatGPT can lead to more questions, and the answers can be easily put together to make content for a 500- or 1000-word assignment.
A former economics professor who taught at a public university before retiring said ChatGPT can be both reliable and unreliable at the same time.
"I have been trying it out and checking on my own publications. I found additional papers that carried my name but were not written by me.
"It also cited me as being from the Medical Faculty and not the Economics Faculty," he said.
The retired professor also added that he used it to ask multiple questions and received correct answers to all of them.
The retired academic, who still teaches part-time at the same university, said that lecturers must be extremely vigilant in order to be the first to identify "abnormalities" in student assignments before they are sent to be checked for plagiarism and similarity index.
Former Universiti Teknologi Malaysia Geoinformation Science and Engineering Faculty lecturer Azmi Hassan said plagiarism among students was rampant even before ChatGPT came into existence.
"Information is so easily available that these students just cut and paste, and when you read their work, you can clearly see the difference between what they have written on their own and the cut and paste paragraphs," he said.
Azmi, who is a senior fellow at the Nusantara Academy, said the help derived from the Internet has resulted in students not being able to think independently when doing their work and assignments.
"When you ask them an oral question, they are not even able to reply with one coherent sentence by themselves as they have depended too much on technology to obtain answers to questions," he added. He said these students can get straight As on their assignments but cannot answer simple oral questions without the help of AI-powered tools.
He said that because a syndrome was being created whereby students were no longer "thinking on their own", AI must be paused for a while.
"I recall several industry leaders, including Elon Musk (Twitter's chief executive officer and owner), warning against the rapid development of artificial intelligence," said Azmi.
(It was reported recently that some 1,000 tech leaders, industry players and researchers, including Musk, had issued an open letter urging for the development of artificial intelligence to be paused as it carried "profound risks to society and humanity".)
Azmi said the Education Ministry and the Higher Education Ministry must recognise the threat of AI applications as well as other applications that students can use to plagiarise.
"It is crucial for them to acknowledge the problem, and there is a need to strategise to overcome this threat," he said.
