Reference no: EM13946545

Case study

Top in enterprise, bottom in integrity plagiarism at universities

This case highlights experiences of plagiarism in Australian universities which are mirrored at universities throughout the world. The article gives examples which show the prevalence of plagiarism based on Internet material and shows solutions which can be adopted.

The past few years have not been kind to Australian universities. It began with the case of Ted Steele, who was fired in 2001 by the University of Wollongong, New South Wales, after accusing senior faculty of encouraging ‘soft marking'.

Then followed claims that a business school in Perth had awarded a degree to a Singapore student who had twice been caught cheating. Meanwhile, a lecturer at a university in Queensland complained that students were being passed despite initial failure marks. And last year David Robinson, the vice-chancellor of Monash University, Melbourne, the country's largest academic institution, was forced to resign after admitting to three cases of plagiarism.

In March this year a fresh scandal broke, this time over allegations that academics at the University of Newcastle, north of Sydney, had tried to cover up plagiarism by offshore students studying through the university's Graduate School of Business. The claims were raised by Ian Firns, a lecturer contracted by the university to teach an organisational effectiveness unit at the Institut WIRA in Malaysia.

Marking his students' assignments in January, Mr Firns discovered 15 cases of ‘blatant and serious' plagiarism. ‘My suspicion was initially raised by the very high standard of English', he says, ‘and inconsistencies in the sophistication of the ideas.'

An internet search showed that some of the students' work had been lifted without attribution from various consultancy and university websites. Marking the papers zero, he noted the web addresses alongside the parts of the papers concerned, together with some comments that ‘weren't particularly complimentary'. He passed the papers to the university's offshore programmes co-ordinator, who agreed that, in line with school policy, the students concerned be allowed to submit revised assignments but that their work score no more than 50 per cent.
Mr Firns later discovered that the original papers had simply been re-marked by another lecturer, with his original comments ‘whited-out'. And the plagiarised work received marks of between 18 and 29.5 out of 35, something Mr Firns found ‘absolutely staggering'.

Brian English, deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Newcastle, denies a cover-up. ‘I instituted an external inquiry within about 30 minutes of getting the allegation', he says.

According to Prof English, the inquiry (which the university refuses to release), found certain staff had misunderstood the plagiarism policy, which was ‘not fully clear'. They had erased Mr Firns' comments but had acted ‘in good faith'.

‘Incredulity is the initial response of every academic to whom I tell this story', says Mr Firns. ‘Derisive laughter is evoked when I tell them what the inquiry found.'

The episode has left Mr Firns disillusioned, particularly as it follows another plagiarism case, this time involving international students studying through the Newcastle Graduate School of Business in Hong Kong.

‘In Hong Kong] information had been downloaded wholesale from the internet', says Mr Firns. ‘In one case a student had gone to a site from the University of Poland, and submitted almost verbatim an English translation of someone's masters thesis in commerce.' Cheating is not new, and certainly not unique to Australia, but the past few years have seen what many consider to be an alarming increase in such incidents.

A survey in 2001 by the University of Canberra revealed that 81 per cent of students sampled had plagiarised at some point in their studies. (Men, it found, were significantly more likely to cheat than women.)

‘People just don't seem to feel the same moral pressure to do the right thing any more', says Paul Rizzo, dean of the Melbourne Business School. Prof Rizzo claims we are seeing the academic equivalent of the moral rot recently exposed in big business.

‘It's a case of if you can get away with it, then it's okay. Academic institutions have always prized intellectual freedom [but] this freedom presumes a level of trustworthiness which is at times sadly lacking.'

Prof Rizzo laments the ease with which students can now pilfer other people's ideas. ‘Whether it's downloading a thesis from the internet, complete with spelling errors, or using a camera-equipped mobile phone to photograph someone's answers in an exam room, technology is opening many more opportunities for people to cheat', he says.

One such technology is the term paper site, some of which hold up to 50,000 ready-made assignments available for between US$5 and US$12 (£3-£7.30) per page.

Kenny Sahr, founder of schoolsucks.com, with its motto: ‘Download your workload', says some of these sites also offer custom papers.

‘This is where the MBA students are going', he says. ‘You call a toll-free number and tell the person on the phone, usually a moonlighting teacher, exactly what you want. These go for US$15 to US$30 a page.'

According to Mr Firns, much of the cheating seems to be occurring among international students, who are worth about A$2bn a year to Australian universities. Some academics believe such profitability persuades many schools to look the other way when it comes to cheating.
‘Some universities have got on a treadmill, with overseas students funding being so much of their revenues that they appear to be doing almost unimaginable things to maintain that funding', says Mike Vitale, dean of the Australian Graduate School of Management.

All the business schools spoken to had recorded some instances of cheating, but claimed levels were so low it did not warrant significant concern.

‘A lot of universities are burying their heads in the sand', says Steve O'Connor, of Caval Collaborative Solutions, an information resources group commissioned last year by six Australian universities to conduct a survey into plagiarism.

Caval used turnitin.com, the plagiarism-detection software, to examine 1,751 essays chosen at random in 17 subjects.

‘We found that 8.85 per cent featured unattributed text in at least 25 per cent of their work. One business essay was 93 per cent plagiarised.'

Business school deans claim such findings have little relevance to them, because their assessments are based less on essays and assignments than class participation and exams, where plagiarism is, by definition, harder to commit.

One even dismissed concerns by claiming that ‘we are teaching graduate students who are much older than most undergraduates and have less to gain and more to lose from being found out as a cheat'.

None of that cuts much ice with Mr O'Connor. ‘Every scrap of evidence suggests that [cheating] is happening at every level.

'I know of one Sydney business school where a senior academic went to the dean and told him he refused to mark the assignments of a whole class because of the obvious level of plagiarism that was evident in the work.‘