In response to Google banning adverts for essay writing services from its network, Top Universities looks at the issue of academic plagiarism in the education arena, and at how international students bring with them different study practices and expectations about their undergraduate study experience.
For many years top universities around the world adopted an ambivalent policy towards plagiarism, hiding behind assumptions and impenetrable institutional rules and regulations, leaving students in the unusual position of not knowing right from wrong. Things are changing, however, with more students having access to international education, bringing with them different study practices and expectations about their undergraduate study experience.
Defining academic plagiarism is as good a place as any to start to explore this issue. Plagiarism includes the copying of all kinds of material, whether by mistake, by omission of reference or through the wilful intention to deceive. In the most serious of cases, academic plagiarism is the complete reproduction of another’s work without any acknowledgement or reference to the original. Of course, incidents of plagiarism are by no means new to the academic world. References to the practice of emulating another author’s work can be found in classical texts as early as those produced by Socrates and Plato. Times have changed considerably and the spectre of plagiarism in the academic community is viewed very differently indeed.
Though there are incidents of deliberate inclusion of material and references by students representing them as their own work, the majority of cases of plagiarism in universities today are largely the result of other factors. Many students are not provided with the basic instruction to ensure that they do not plagiarise another’s work and, in some cases, differing cultural attitudes to the practice and conventions related to learning make plagiarism a particularly complex issue. For example, in the academic study of learning, there is sufficient evidence to suggest the morality of copying or cheating to gain advantage is something of a western concept and that students coming into this learning tradition often have an entirely different view as to what is and is not acceptable.
The rise of plagiarism amongst university students, most recently highlighted in a UK report in 2005, has certainly come hand in hand with the explosion of student numbers and the growth of the Internet. In the US, a 2001 survey of 4,500 graduate students indicated that 52% copied at least a few sentences from the Internet without citing a source, many of whom were unaware that this was bad practice. International students entering new learning cultures are often unaware as to what is acceptable in their new university, while additionally having to cope with the added pressures of adjusting to a new culture and a new way of living, studying and writing in an unfamiliar language, being away from their normal support networks and the knowledge that the financial investment in their education by their families is significant.
Simeon Underwood, Academic Registrar at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) comments, “there have been major developments in the area of student plagiarism over the past three years or so. For example, at LSE we are rewriting our regulations on plagiarism to put them into plainer and less legalistic language. Some of the changes are also 'remedial' - as part of our study skills support work, we do sessions on how to avoid plagiarism by using correct methods for citation.”
Universities are certainly taking a more responsible role in supporting students to ensure that they do not unwillingly fall victim to plagiarism in their studies. At Massey University in New Zealand, academic members of staff and students alike are offered access to support through training programs to enable them to recognize and prevent incidents of plagiarism through academic best practice using internationally accepted standards of referencing and citation. By adopting a much more supportive institutional framework that treats all students fairly, Massey, like many other top universities, is in a much stronger position to detect cases of plagiarism intended to cheat from those born from the accidental or cultural.
One thing that has made the university battle against plagiarism much easier to fight in recent years is the emergence of dedicated software packages aimed at electronically screening students’ work from some of the more telltale signs of the practice. Programs like Turnitin are now routinely used by universities to detect plagiarism, checking electronically submitted work against a database of billions of webpages, commercially available journals, periodicals and other students’ work already submitted through the system.
There are more ways than ever before to fall into the plagiarism trap, but there are also far fewer excuses for doing so. As top universities and colleges around the world make their procedures more transparent, the responsibility for submitting original and correctly referenced essays and projects is most certainly on the individual student. Though you are unlikely to ever want to deliberately deceive, being aware of some of the issues around plagiarism will ensure that your university career is a little more productive.