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Combating student plagiarism in higher education
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Feb, 2008: Plagiarism is a complex concept to define as it incorporates a diverse range of
actions from merely replacing words in an already published or submitted
manuscript using a word processor's thesaurus to the overall theft of someone
else's intellectual effort. |
'New frontiers in cheating', an article in
Britannica Book of the Year 2003 defined this concept as "an act of taking the
writings of another person and passing them off as one's own". It further
presented plagiarism as a "fraudulence closely related to forgery or piracy."
However it annulled the presentation of duplicated thoughts expressed in
different words as an act of plagiarism.
Extending this definition of
plagiarism, student plagiarism can be further defined as plagiarism with the
intent of gaining academic credit. Lathrop, Ann, and Kathleen Foss in their work
Student Cheating and Plagiarism in the Internet Era: A Wake-Up Call (2000) cited
student plagiarism as of two types - Deliberate plagiarism and Unintentional
plagiarism. Deliberate plagiarism refers to the "wholesale copying of another's
paper with the intention of representing it as one's own" and the unintentional
kind of plagiarism refers to "careless paraphrasing and citing of the source
material so that improper or misleading credit is given". This article is aimed
at examining issues related to student plagiarism and its adverse affects on
delivering quality education. It also looks at the way by which student
plagiarism could be combated.
Most of the students pursuing higher
academic qualifications plagiarise deliberately due to lack of skills in finding
and evaluating secondary data, problems in ascertaining internet sources,
unrealistic deadlines, lack of teamwork, lack of faculty concentration, improper
penalties on detected cases of plagiarism and inadequate guidelines for
completion of assignments or projects. The continuously increasing amount of
information on the web and the accessibility to this information has further
aggravated the issue of student plagiarism.
Albeit the initiatives of the
Higher Education Commission (HEC) in Pakistan, various sources of secondary data
have been made available to the students but either they are ignorant of these
sources or they happen to be novice users. Many undergraduate students still do
not know anything about exploring databases for journal articles or using the
library catalogue for reference literature.
As a faculty member of some
leading institutions in Pakistan, including the University of the Punjab, I have
often observed that students, generally, are reluctant to use library
catalogues, giving preference to Internet sources. Although, it is perfectly
acceptable to use Internet sources too, the practice of copy or cut and paste is
keeping students from using their own problem solving skills.
It has been
seen that students at both the under-graduate and post-graduate levels are also
ignorant to the ways of accessing accurate information online. Free web hosting
and cheap web servers these days have enabled everyone to publish material on
the web. There is no quality control. One can only rely on personal judgment or
the popularity of the web publisher in order to validate the content of the
material. For instance, one can always count on the Harvard Business Review
website when working on a business communication or marketing assignment or
anything else related to business studies. The widely accepted parameters to be
considered when assessing web content are authorship, publishing body, point of
view or bias, referral to other sources, verifiability and currency (which
refers to the timeliness of a web document).
Another reason for student
plagiarism is unrealistic deadlines for the completion of coursework exercises.
Deadlines are usually given at random without assessing the student's workload
during a semester. This provokes students into plagiarising instead of producing
original work.
In case of group assignments or projects, it has been
commonly observed that despite forming a formal group, students do not usually
work coherently with just one or two of them becoming active members while the
others rely on their work. Students have also adopted the self-determined ritual
of dividing work in accordance with the number of courses they are studying in a
semester. For instance, if there are five members in a group, one may develop
the coursework exercise of financial accounting, another might work on business
communication, with someone else finishing the management project. Hence all the
members would be working separately on different coursework exercises, thus
demolishing the original essence of group tasks and further invoking student
plagiarism.
One of the most important reasons for student plagiarism is
the lack of faculty concentration in coursework exercises. In most higher
educational institutions of Pakistan, the prevalent workload for one faculty
member is four courses/sections per semester. On average, there are 30 students
studying in one course/section. This leads to the estimate that on average the
cardinality is one faculty member to 120 students per semester. Apart from this,
many faculty members, on an average, are teaching two visiting courses, which is
an additional 60 students. Even if a faculty member spends 15 minutes per
student on one coursework exercise, it will make a total of 40 hours assistance
and evaluation on one coursework exercise, which is equivalent to 26 additional
lecture sessions of 1.5 hour each.
Presently, the most important
responsibility a faculty member performs is classroom teaching. But classroom
teaching in the semester system is only one third of the overall activities
being performed. In the absence of coursework exercise guidelines that should be
issued by the faculty, a student may find it difficult to avoid
plagiarism.
It is important to understand that plagiarism is difficult to
be detected, but easy to be prevented provided both the faculty and
administration of an institution imparting higher education are poised towards
the creation of a learning centric environment. It is a serious academic
problem. Institutions need to tackle it rather urgently with an anti-plagiarism
policy, which needs to be pro-active. Standards across the higher education
sector need a kind of uniformity, which may shrink profits for newly established
institutions in the short term, but will prove lucrative in the long
term.
The following measures can
be taken for creating such an environment:
Tutorial sessions for
navigating the library
As has already been discussed, one cause leading
to student plagiarism is ignorance on the student's part in navigating library
catalogues. Librarians in association with the course instructors can play an
active role in conducting such sessions. Librarians at present only play a
passive role by just limiting themselves to maintaining the library catalogue
and library resources. Higher educational institutions should also take steps to
develop cyber libraries in addition to the traditional
ones.
Instructional sessions for citing references
Duplicate
thoughts expressed in one's own words cannot be treated as acts of plagiarism.
However, it is important that acknowledgement be given to the thoughts, words
and ideas of others. Citing references can prevent unintentional plagiarism.
There are different styles for citing references — ACS, AIM, AIP, the APA, ASA
and MLA citation format, and the Harvard system of referencing. Instructors
should explain to their students how to use these citation formats when giving
an assignment or project.
Mindless coursework exercises
These are
exercises, which have no context to the contents of the course. For instance,
asking students to interview project managers of software houses can be a
mindless exercise in data structure. The exercise would rather suit software
engineering. Such exercises, it has been observed, invite
plagiarism.
Realistic deadlines
Instructors should award realistic
deadlines for submission of coursework exercises. The deadline should take into
account:
- Scope of assignment/project
- Total workload of student in a semester
- Span between deadline and examination schedule
- Deadlines of assignments/projects of other courses
- Special needs of students with disabilities
It would be more appropriate, if a separate
assignments and project coordination department with the objective of
assignments and project submissions is established. Instructors could then
coordinate with the department before giving any new coursework
exercise.
Reduced workload for instructors
It is important for
higher educational institutions to reduce the teaching workload from four
courses/sections per semester to two per semester. In addition to this, it is
important for instructors to also not take such flexibility as an opportunity
for increasing their visiting workload, thus increasing their visiting
remunerations.
Detailed guidelines for the completion of assignments and
projects
Instructors should provide a complete guideline for the
completion of assignments and projects to their students rather than giving them
one-sentence questions or statements. Such guidelines may contain:
- Objective of the assignment/project
- Problem description
- Tools required
- Examples of reference text/online sources
- Reference citing format
- Evaluation criteria
- Modular decomposition of assignment/project
Continuous feedback from students
Rather than
interacting with the students at the time of submission of assignments/projects,
instructors should be periodically interacting with the students during the
completion tenure of the work given. This will have a two-pronged effect — the
instructor will be able to provide direction to the students in finding
solutions as well as assess the existence of any sort of
plagiarism.
Penalties
Rigorous penalties should be imposed on
detected cases of student plagiarism, ranging from written warnings to exclusion
from the institution based upon the number of times the offence is repeated.
Penalties should not only be treated as part of the institutional calendar. They
should be strictly enforced in presence of the fact that a learning centric
environment was made available to the students.
An educated guess
In my above article, I had
discussed some of the major reasons associated with this very important concern
of higher education. I also tried to present certain measures, which could be
utilised as tools to avoid student plagiarism in higher education. One of the
reasons that I cited in the article was giving "mindless exercises" by the
faculty members. Associated with this reason of student plagiarism is the
practice of evaluating the assignment and project work given to the graduate and
post-graduate students.
Evaluation as defined by Ralph W. Taylor in his
famous book Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction which refers to the
"process for determining the degree to which desired changes in behavior are
actually taking place." Dr M.A.R. Pasha described "desired changes in behavior"
as "learning outcomes" in his work Enforcing Uniformity in Curriculum
Development.
Regarding educational evaluation, the Joint Committee on
Standards for Educational Evaluation, which is a coalition between American and
Canadian professional associations, presented three standards of educational
evaluation namely "Personal evaluation standards", "Programme evaluation
standards" and "Student evaluation standards". These standards are decomposed
into four generic sections — utility, feasibility, propriety and accuracy. These
standards focus on the evaluations to be conducted legally and ethically with a
utilatarian approcah and specifically the "Student evaluation standards"
emphasise that the student evaluations may act as a tool to provide sound,
accurate and credible information about student learning and
performance.
Taking into account, the above divulged context of the
definition of evaluation as given by Ralph W. Taylor and the educational
evaluation standards, evaluation can be further illustrated as a sequential and
disciplined methodology for both quantitative and qualitative assessment of the
perceived and actual learning outcomes of a submitted learning module.
In
a meeting of the Inter University Course Curriculum Committee (IUCCC),
constituted by the Governor Punjab in 2003 and chaired by Dr M.A.R. Pasha, it
was critically pointed out that assignments and projects given to the
undergraduate and graduate students are not yielding the desired objectives in
sessional assessments. Being a member of the committee, I observed that the
problem was and is still existing due to the lack of effort by the faculty
members in quantifying the qualitative aspects of the learning outcomes, which
can provide sound, accurate and credible information about student learning and
performance as enviasaged by the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational
Evaluation.
Learning outcomes refers to the explicit objectives and can
be mapped from the learning outcomes of a coursework or academic programme. The
generic learning outcomes for any assignment or project work can be categorised
into four widely accepted parameters — knowledge, cognitive skills, specific
subject skills and key skills. Over here knowledge refers to the ability of
reproducing previously learned material; cognitive skills corresponds to
description, comparison and evaluation of the studied content; specific subject
skills map to the practical skills and key skills point to the transferable
skills like communication or presentation. Interestingly, all these learning
outcomes are qualitative and need to be transformed into certain quantitative
measurements for yielding accurate and credible information about
student-learning and performance.
In devising such a quantitative
measurement, course instructors must take into account the nature of the course.
Each course in an academic programme of graduate or post-graduate level is
having a unique set of learning outcomes. Some courses are text intensive, while
some are more practical oriented. Some may require group work and for some
courses group work may not at all be appropriate. For instance, the course of
business communication in management studies is practical-oriented. Assessing
cognitive and key skills needs to be more emphasised than knowledge or specific
subject skills. Whereas in the course of accounting, assessing knowledge,
specific subject skills and cognitive skills needs to be more focused than key
skills. It is usually observed that most of the faculty members are teaching a
variety of courses at the same time and apply a uniform set of evaluation
techniques for all the courses, which is not an appropriate exercise at graduate
and post-graduate levels.
The four learning outcomes described earlier
are usually assessed from the finally submitted report, presentation or a
practical demonstration. It is quite a difficult phase to evaluate the
submissions without the presence of a scale of assessment and it is frequently
observed that students at the end of a semester are given their overall
sessional score without being told about the strengths or pitfalls of their
submissions.
In order to have an effective assessment, the overall
performance can be evaluated through individual performance demonstration at
assessment stations against a pre-established rating scale, self assessment,
carefully designed peer assessment, submissions assessment and group assessment.
In this regard, rating scales can be established for each of the mentioned
component of overall evaluation. Such rating scales will be constituted of
learning outcomes to be assessed, evidences collected against those learning
outcomes, and the degree of suitability of the evidences. It is advisable that
instructors should notify the class about these scales at the start of the
semester.
It must be realised that evaluations can carry substantial
risks for students, especially when they are improperly or poorly conducted.
Following rigorous standards and logical practices while evaluating assignments
and projects are integral to student development and it is the course instructor
who is at the forefront in determining student progress using sound evaluative
practices which include careful planning, appropriate assessment strategies,
and, most importantly, sound professional judgment.
By Farhan S. Sherazi
The writer is assistant professor and in charge of academics at Dadabhoy Institute of Higher
Education Dawn
Your Comments
"plagiarism is a big issue, student should have to avoid it."
Name: ffaheem
Email: farrukhfaheem@gmail.com
City, Country: Karachi, Pakistan
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| Education News | | Updated: 07 Feb, 2012 |
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