Professor plagiarism threatens academic integrity

Teachers after students prepared to steal material and claim copyright

AMMAN - Alternative staff

November 2003

Despite the strict rules private universities in the region try to enforce to protect intellectual property, the number and ways of violations are rapidly increasing.

In any exam, academic or non academic, several people tend to cheat. The tendency increases when the reputation of the person being tested is in question.

As a student you might lose an academic year, a scholarship or even acceptance for graduate studies if you do not get a specific grade in a course. To avoid this academic loss, the easiest way out might seem: Cheating or plagiarism.

In both cases, a person tries to solve his/her problem by claiming the ideas or work of others.

Students end up cheating in their exams, or using the internet search for a little copy/paste to do a research or even a thesis, or even to buy some projects or papers.

University students can get a paper for $100 at most and a computer project for up to $1,000.

Four students from a prestigious private university in Lebanon who took the same course together reported that they bought a full computer course project.

Three of them from a software development company for $800, and one from the instructor assistant for $650, just because “the project was too hard to be done, and was worth 35 percent of the course grade. It was also a required course for graduation.”

Interestingly, according to a survey conducted earlier this year about different aspects of academic integrity, some 300 communications students at California State University were very clear about practices that constitute breaches of academic integrity.

Ninety percent of students surveyed answered that cheating on tests is a breach of academic integrity while 80 percent said that using somebody else's text was also a breach of integrity.

However, most of these students said they cheated at some point of their university lives.

For such cases, the United States and European countries have devised two main strategies namely prevention and detection.

Instructors were encouraged to provide students with presentations about academic integrity, educating their students on how to research and how to cite their references. They were also told to impose some strict regulations for the exams that might vary from placing many exam versions to prohibiting the use of SMS and cameras of cell phones, and to strictly implement the rules written on such violations.

As for detection, the same way search engines are used to help in cheating and plagiarism; a new market is now growing for plagiarism and cheating detection software.

Using the search engine techniques, such software searches the World Wide Web looking for similarities in a given paper or project, and reports back to the instructor about the section(s) that were used from other authors, with references to the original text.

Another detection strategy is to create a central database in the teachers’ university where they can share all the papers and projects submitted and can use a software that can track the similarities and differences between the papers or projects.

But just like students do, instructors themselves sometimes steal research martial or courses from instructors in other institutions, most of the time in a very primitive way mistakenly leaving the name of the author or the name of the course on the handouts that they claim that had authored.

Along these lines, a university student in Lebanon reported that she blackmailed her instructor because she figured out the source from where he copies his exams and course material to which he previously claimed ownership for three years.

Another way of professor cheating is when some instructors claim credit for projects initially done by their students.

Alternative interviewed students who reported that their project websites or their final project was sold for business companies. A student once read about his instructor's publications only to discover that the ideas were taken from his (the student’s) thesis.