Plagiarism in Higher Education: A Failure of Management and Technology
Ali Mansouri Writer, Researcher, Consultant (There is some oversimplification in this article to make it accessible to the general reader.)
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Introduction Teachers at different levels of education, especially higher education, are struggling nowadays with the problem of plagiarism which, in simple terms, refers to the "wrongful appropriation and stealing and publication of another author's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions and the representation of them as one's own original work.” (Random House Compact Unabridged Dictionary, 1996). Plagiarism is a form of cheating and stealing and should be treated as such. But the problem is not as simple as it sounds from this definition. Teachers need effective tools to determine that a student or a group of students has committed the act of plagiarism and the percentage of plagiarism in their academic report or research. Then the time available for the teachers to check plagiarism in a satisfactory way both in terms of academic standards and in terms of fairness to the students who themselves may not be aware of the problem or may have a very superficial understanding of it. It is unreasonable to throw the problem on the teachers to solve though they are almost always unfairly overloaded with lectures and the supervision of too many students. Then comes the plagiarism detection software available in the institution and how effective it is in detecting plagiarism. There are many unqualified, incompetent and stingy senior managers who are prepared to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on useless and trivial publicity campaigns to improve their rotten image whereas they are unwilling to spend a fraction of the amount on an effective plagiarism detection software.
Plagiarism: Definition and Scope Plagiarism definition is actually straightforward. When you use someone else’s work without crediting them, it is seen as stealing their intellectual property. Just like theft, the penalties for plagiarized work should be severe in the academic world. The real problem is that some people, especially students, are not even aware of what they are doing. With an effective plagiarism detector, it is possible to spread awareness of plagiarism while letting students and researchers know how they can avoid it. The detector should provide real-life examples of plagiarism to help identify it in the future. Let us look at some dictionary definitions of plagiarism: plagiarize (BrE also –ise) (disapproving) “to copy another person’s ideas, words or work and pretend that they are your own.” (Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, p. 962) Page 2 of 14
plagiarism “(noun) [U, C] (disapproving) an act of plagiarizing sth; sth that has been plagiarized” (Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, p. 961) ENGLISH OXFORD LIVING DICTIONARY NOUN mass noun The practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own. ‘there were accusations of plagiarism’ count noun ‘it claims there are similar plagiarisms in the software produced at the university’ According to Bela Gipp academic plagiarism encompasses: "The use of ideas, concepts, words, or structures without appropriately acknowledging the source to benefit in a setting where originality is expected." (Gipp 2014). The definition by Gipp is an abridged version of Fishman's (2009) definition of plagiarism, which proposed five elements characteristic of plagiarism. Plagiarism is considered academic dishonesty and a breach of ethics. It is subject to sanctions like penalties, suspension, and even expulsion. Plagiarism may not be considered a crime in some countries, but can constitute copyright infringement. However, in academia, it is a serious ethical offense (Green 2002). In industry, it may cause serious and lengthy legal disputes. Plagiarism and copyright infringement overlap to a considerable extent, but they are not equivalent concepts.
Plagiarism may not be defined or punished by law, but rather by
institutions and professional organizations. Although plagiarism in some contexts is regarded as theft or stealing and the concept may not exist in a legal sense, the use of someone else's work in order to gain academic credit meet some legal definitions of fraud (Newton and Lang 2016). Some cases may be treated as unfair competition or a violation of the system of moral rights. The increased availability of copyrighted material due to the development of information technology Page 3 of 14
has intensified the debate as to whether copyright offences are crimes in the legal sense. " (Gabriel 2010). Plagiarism is also considered a moral offense against anyone who has provided the plagiarist with a benefit in exchange for what is specifically supposed to be original content (for example, the plagiarist's publisher, employer, or teacher). In such cases, acts of plagiarism may sometimes also form part of a claim for breach of the plagiarist's contract, or, if done knowingly, for a civil offense. An extreme form of plagiarism, known as contract cheating involves students paying someone else to do their work (e.g. essay, assignment) for them (Newton and Lang 2016). This has become a very widespread phenomenon, especially in oil-rich countries, due to the advances in technology. While plagiarism in scholarship and journalism has a centuries-old history, the development of the Internet, where articles appear as electronic texts, has made copying and cheating a great deal easier (Blum 2010). Predicated upon an expected level of learning/comprehension having been achieved, all associated academic accreditation becomes seriously undermined if plagiarism is allowed to become the norm within academic submissions (Cully 2013); or within academic accreditation processes. We will say something more about plagiarism and academic accreditation later on.
Plagiarism Detection Plagiarism detection is the process of locating instances of plagiarism within a work or document. Detection of plagiarism can be either manual or software-assisted. Manual detection requires substantial efforts and excellent memory as it is done by a teacher or a checker who goes through the report or assignment sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, or idea by idea, to see if these sentences, paragraphs or ideas have been taken from someone else without acknowledgement. This manual detection is impractical in cases where too many documents must be compared, or original documents are not available for comparison. It also takes too much time which is not available for the ordinary teacher in a normal educational setting.
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Software-assisted detection allows vast collections of documents to be compared to each other using statistics and technology. This approach has recently become popular in higher education institutions but the results are not as satisfactory as has been expected or claimed. The widespread use of computers and the advent of the Internet has made it easier to plagiarize the work of others. Most cases of plagiarism are found in academia, where documents are typically essays or reports. However, plagiarism can be found in virtually any field, including novels, scientific papers and art designs. To check a large number of students’ reports and assignments for plagiarism by hand is practically impossible, and this is what makes any plagiarism software so powerful for all the sources it can check. Nonetheless, there are some serious shortcomings associated with even the most powerful plagiarism detection software such as Turnitin and Safeassign. The basic problem with the plagiarism detection tools, whether they are free plagiarism detection tools on the Internet or expensive software, is that they identify the use of even ordinary language or specialized words and expressions as “plagiarism” just because these words and expressions have been found in both the checked work and some other original source found in the database of the plagiarism checking tool or software. Oftentimes words and expressions like “infrastructure, industry, field, magnetic, etc.” are identified as plagiarism. This shortcoming becomes so unreasonable that even the basic words of the English language like, “is, was, become, the” are identified as plagiarized items! The detection becomes very awkward and academically unacceptable when a quotation put between single or double quotation marks is identified as plagiarism! This is academically unacceptable. Any writer or researcher is free to use any quotation in his/her paper or report as long as the quotation is credited to the original writer regardless of whether this quotation has been used before by other writers or researchers. The same applies to works used as references. They are also identified as plagiarized items if they are found in both the checked text and the original source though references can be used and referred to by writers and researchers as many times as they want. This is a serious shortcoming and a serious failure of technology in the basic design of the plagiarism detection software. In order to deceive the plagiarism detection software, students and researchers may resort to “rogeting” –using words and expressions as substitutions to those found in the original work (Nelson 2007). Page 5 of 14
This “technique�, if it can be called so, has rapidly evolved and has become widespread among students and unethical researchers and academics who seek to fool plagiarism detection software. This often results in the creation of new meaningless phrases through extensive synonym exchanges. The term, a reference to Roget's Thesaurus, was coined by Chris Sadler, a lecturer in business information systems at Middlesex University, who discovered the practice in papers submitted by his students (Grove 2014). In its basic form, rogeting simply consists of replacing words with their synonyms, chosen from a thesaurus. Several websites can perform this task online for free. A plagiarism checker would not usually be able to detect the original source; however, the main drawback is that the new automatically-generated text might not sound natural or might not make sense at all. The documents produced through this kind of technically-advanced rogeting beat plagiarism checkers but, unlike the simplest form of rogeting, they are visually identical to the original ones.
Citation-based Plagiarism Detection (CbPD) This approach to plagiarism detection has been proposed by Fishman (2009). It relies on citation analysis and is the only approach to plagiarism detection that does not rely on the textual similarity between the plagiarised text and the original one. CbPD examines the citation and reference information in texts to identify similar patterns in the citation sequences. As such, this approach is suitable for scientific texts, or other academic documents that contain citations. Citation analysis to detect plagiarism is a relatively young concept. It has not been adopted by commercial software, but a first prototype of a citation-based plagiarism detection system exists. Similar order and proximity of citations in the examined documents are the main criteria used to compute citation pattern similarities. Citation patterns represent subsequences non-exclusively containing citations shared by the documents compared. Factors, including the absolute number or relative fraction of shared citations in the pattern, as well as the probability that citations co-occur in a document are also considered to quantify the patterns’ degree of similarity (Gipp and Norman 2011).
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Stylometry As teachers, we always check students’ reports, assignments and other written submissions by looking into the style and the linguistic features of the submitted texts. We know our students’ level and abilities and, through time, we get to know their style and what they can and cannot write. Teachers at schools still do that and they can tell when a student has submitted a written assignment far above his/her style and level. This approach is very helpful in detecting the original author of students’ texts at schools and in detecting plagiarism. But this approach has very severe limitations. It takes a great deal of time which is not normally available to the teachers, especially at the end of the academic year. It is also impracticable when you have “group projects” and the report has been written by a number of students, which is a common case in any higher education institution. This idea of “author attribution”, identifying the author of a document by analyzing the style and the features of the document, has recently been taken up by Stylometry which uses statistical methods based on Computer-Assisted Plagiarism Detection (CaPD) for quantifying an author’s writing style (Holmes 1998; Juola 2006). By constructing and comparing stylometric models for different texts, paragraphs or passages that are stylistically different from others, hence potentially plagiarized, can be detected. This approach is likely to fail in cases where the texts are strongly paraphrased and closely resemble the personal writing style of the plagiarist or if a text has been written by many authors.
Student Perspectives Most, if not all, students are not aware of the problem of plagiarism in their first year of college or university study or they do not fully understand it. This is especially true in countries where the pre-university educational system is based on “spoon-feeding” whereby students just reiterate what they read or what they are told. They lack the essential research skills and many of them find the “copy and paste” approach a legitimate way of getting knowledge and doing assignments. There are other reasons for students to plagiarise. Outcomes-based secondary education, the steeply rising cost of college tuition, and an economic climate in which higher education is valued for its effect on future earnings above all else. Page 7 of 14
These factors each have a role to play in explaining why students might pursue good grades by any means necessary. These incentives have arisen in the same era as easily accessible ways to cheat electronically and with almost intolerable pressures on students to get high marks and never fail at any cost. The best way to prevent plagiarism is to educate students on how to properly conduct research, make correct citations and quotations, and how to produce original work. But in most colleges and universities, there is no formal instruction and very little informal instruction to help students avoid plagiarism. Teachers are either too busy to talk about it or they simply inform the students about it without having sufficient time to guide their students into how to avoid plagiarism. Teachers are overloaded most of the time or they simply do not care about it because the atmosphere in the college or the university is one of indifference or it is a toxic atmosphere where teachers, especially expatriate teachers, cannot challenge students on the originality of their assignments without creating serious problems for themselves or even losing their jobs. This case is widespread in private colleges and universities which are run by incompetent and corrupt senior managers who are after appeasing their students to avoid problems or to retain students as these institutions depend heavily on students’ tuition-fees to keep going and make profits.
Plagiarism Policy In most higher education institutions, plagiarism by students, teachers, or researchers is considered academic dishonesty or academic fraud, and those who commit them are subject to academic penalties including expulsion from the institution. Some institutions are very keen to have an atmosphere of honesty and integrity in teaching and research, and hold up academic standards. They advocate a zero-tolerance policy towards plagiarism by using plagiarism detection software to uncover potential plagiarism. They also offer teachers and committees sufficient time to check assignments, reports, dissertations, theses and research papers. They address the issue of academic integrity by providing students with thorough orientations and writing courses to help them understand the problem and how to avoid it (Lipson 2003). Charges of plagiarism against students and professors are typically heard by internal disciplinary committees, by which students and professors have agreed to be bound. (Clarke 2006). Page 8 of 14
For professors and researchers, plagiarism is punished by sanctions ranging from suspension to termination, along with the loss of credibility and perceived integrity (Kock 1999). In some other higher education institutions, especially in the private sector, the policies towards plagiarism are strict on paper but extremely loose in practice. They pay lip service to the issue and talk about plagiarism like any other respectable college or university by regarding it as cheating and academic dishonesty but in reality they do nothing to stop it or help students avoid it. They are not prepared to take effective measures like installing electronic plagiarism detection tools or offering teachers sufficient time to check academic assignments and reports. You find the teachers overloaded with lectures and duties and are punished for making problems with the students by discovering plagiarism or punishing students for doing it.
Rotten System In some countries, the Ministry of Higher Education annually allocates a “quota” (a number) of students to each higher education institution in the country. This covers government and private institutions including all colleges and universities. Regrettably, this does not depend on established national or international criteria such as the level of academic performance of the institution, its capacity, the facilities available, the quality of its graduate and other well-known criteria for the admission of students in higher education. It mostly depends upon the “personal relationships” of the owners of the institution and its senior managers with the people in charge of the allocation of students in the Ministry. It also depends on the political power and influence of these people in the country. The more powerful and influential they are; the more students the Ministry allocates to their institutions every year. This has contributed a great deal to the deterioration of academic standards of the graduates in most countries. Whether there is a high level of plagiarism, cheating, deception, fraud and forgery in the institution or not, the institution gets its annual quota of students. This is a rotten system and needs to be drastically reversed if we really care about higher education and the future of the students and the country. You may imagine a start-up university where the owners and the senior managers do not care about anything; nor are they held accountable for anything because of this rotten system. They do not care about whether or not their university is up to the standards, or even the minimal standards, as long as they can survive and a good number of students are annually allocated to them without any consideration to academic standards. They are deceiving everybody and they rely on “fake’ Page 9 of 14
information and data, especially on the Internet, to “inflate” their achievements as if they were competing with Oxford, Cambridge or Harvard universities whereas most, if not all, people know they are big liars, cheaters and dishonest people. Plagiarism in such a higher education institution does not really mean anything but a very normal practice by students and teachers.
Detachment from Reality Most investors in higher education, especially in the Middle East, are not well-educated. They are just rich businessmen and are looking for opportunities to invest their money for good return. Most of them are owners of factories and hypermarkets and are not aware of the important challenges and issues in higher education. The same applies to many senior managers who are detached from reality in different ways. They rely mainly on statistics provided by different departments such as the Registration Departments some of which are well-known for mass forging of students’ grades. Most of these statistics are fabricated and are limited to students’ names and forged grades. It is no surprise then that such investors and senior managers are not aware of the problem of plagiarism and do not exert any effort to solve it. They are completely detached from reality and are unaware of what actually happens in their colleges and universities.
Corruption There is a close link between plagiarism and corruption, both of them involve cheating, lying, dishonesty and lack of integrity. So you need to look first at what the senior managers do and how they behave before you can tell whether there is plagiarism in the institution or not. You do not need to go far. When the senior managers indulge in all sorts of cheating, lying, forging students’ grades, conspiring against honest and hard-working teachers and staff, then you will certainly find that plagiarism is widespread and talking about putting an end to it is really meaningless and pointless. What makes things more than worse is the fact that many senior managers have nothing to do with higher education. They do not possess the slightest information about how a higher education institution is to be run and conduct business. They are incompetent and inefficient and are concerned about making profits for the investors rather than offering quality education to their students. They have crept into their senior management positions through personal Page 10 of 14
relationships with the investors or with the Board of Directors and Board of Trustees; not through academic qualifications or leadership qualities. We do not expect such corrupt senior managers with their “fish-market mentality� to care about plagiarism or about anything else. They throw everything on the shoulders of the teachers to tackle and solve. It is no surprise then that the problem of plagiarism has been getting more acute and has created a toxic academic environment in institutions run by such corrupt senior managers. The Internal Audit units in many higher education institutions are either complacent about plagiarism or are run by corrupt internal auditors who are prepared to cover up and appease the corrupt VC and Assistant VC in return for the renewal of their work contract. The Academic Accreditation Authorities and Quality Assurance Agencies in many countries are no help, either. Many corrupt Assistant Deans and VCs have crept into these authorities and agencies to play dirty and corruptive roles. They fabricate the documents that are relevant to academic accreditation and quality assurance of colleges and universities in return for bribes and other favors.
Conclusions Plagiarism is a serious problem in higher education institutions whether they are state-run or private. It is a problem with far-reaching consequences for all specializations, especially the sciences. The problem is getting worse due to failures in technology and management. Even the best plagiarism detection software available today can only identify the simple copy and paste plagiarism. It fails to detect paraphrased plagiarism (rogeting) or structural and idea plagiarism. Teachers and human plagiarism checkers are key factors in fighting and solving the problem of plagiarism in higher education institutions. But they need effective tools to detect plagiarism in academic reports and assignments. They also need the courage to do this job. This courage will not be available to them unless they know they are supported by the regulations of the institution and are not to be punished just because they caught the students cheating in their plagiarised assignments. This is especially true about expatriate teachers who are afraid of losing their jobs if a problem arises with the students about their plagiarised texts.
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Investors and senior managers in higher education need to be aware of the gravity of the problem and take effective measures to eliminate or, at least, minimize its negative effects. These senior managers should get out of their “ivory towers” and see by themselves what is actually happening in their institutions. Unfortunately, there are many unqualified, incompetent and corrupt senior managers who are indifferent to the problem. They are more concerned about making profits rather than offering quality education without plagiarism. Because they are incompetent and unqualified, they take stupid and awkward measures creating a very unhealthy academic environment where work ethics are non-existent. Technology does not stand still. It moves very fast. We look forward to a digital system of plagiarism detection tools that can help fight plagiarism effectively.
References Blum, Susan D. (2010). My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture. New York: Cornell University Press. Clarke, Roger (2006). "Plagiarism by Academics: More Complex than It Seems". Journal of the Association for Information Systems. 7 (1), pp. 91–121. Cully, P. (2013). Plagiarism Avoidance in Academic Submissions. Dublin: Dublin Institute of Technology. Fishman, Teddi (2009). "We know it when we see it is not good enough: toward a standard definition of plagiarism that transcends theft, fraud, and copyright"(PDF). Proceedings of the 4th Asia Pacific Conference on Educational Integrity. p.5. Gabriel, Trip (2010). "Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age". The New York Times (August 1). Gipp, Bela (2014). Citation-based Plagiarism Detection: Detecting Disguised and Crosslanguage Plagiarism using Citation Pattern Analysis. Berlin: Springer (Vieweg. p.10.)
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Gipp, Bela and M. Norman (2011). "Citation Pattern Matching Algorithms for Citation-based Plagiarism Detection: Greedy Citation Tiling, Citation Chunking and Longest Common Citation Sequence", Proceedings of the 11th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering. Green, Stuart (2002). "Plagiarism, Norms, and the Limits of Theft Law: Some Observations on the Use of Criminal Sanctions in Enforcing Intellectual Property Rights". Hastings Law Journal, 54 (1). Grove, Jack (2014). "Sinister Buttocks? Roget would blush at the crafty cheek Middlesex lecturer gets to the bottom of meaningless phrases found while marking essays". Times Higher Education. Retrieved 15 July 2015. Holmes, David (1998). "The Evolution of Stylometry in Humanities Scholarship", Literary and Linguistic Computing, 13 (3), pp. 111–117. Juola, Patrick (2006), "Authorship Attribution" (PDF), Foundations and Trends Information Retrieval, 1,pp. 233–334. Kock, N. (1999). "A Case of Academic Plagiarism". Communications of the ACM. 42(7), pp. 96–104. Lipson, Abigail (2003). "The Responsible Plagiarist". About Campus. 8- Issue 3, p.7. Nelson, Robert S. (2007). Library Plagiarism Policies. Association of College & Research Libraries, p. 65. Newton, Philip M. and Lang, Christopher (2016). Bretag, Tracey, ed. Handbook of Academic Integrity. Springer Singapore. pp. 249–271.
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