All Posts Tagged With: "Academic Dishonesty"
I was a plagiarist
The academy comes down too hard on honest mistakes
Maclean's writer Emma Teitel
From the Maclean’s University Rankings—on sale now.
It’s fall, and over 800,000 undergraduate students have just begun classes at universities across Canada. In the next 12 months, 32 per cent are likely to binge drink and smoke marijuana, 14 per cent will probably drop out, and—to introduce a new scholastic rite of passage—more than 1,000 will be accused of plagiarism. Scores will be convicted, but there’s a good chance only a few will be guilty of anything more than oversight. I know this because I am a plagiarist.
I was accused in my third year at Dalhousie University (a mature plagiarist, they would say) by a creative-writing professor a few days before reading week: I had failed to attribute a philosophical term, “category mistake,” to the philosopher who first used it, an omission that put me in direct violation of Dalhousie’s academic dishonesty policy. In addition, I gave an example of the term that was nearly identical to the example used by its originator, Gilbert Ryle, in his 1949 book, The Concept of Mind. Here’s what I wrote: “Such a question is the stuff of a philosophical category mistake. For example, if a small child touring Halifax were to ask his mother and father ‘show me a university,’ the parents might take him on a tour of Dalhousie, showing him all the different faculty and athletic buildings, and confused, he would still ask, ‘show me a university,’ so the same concept applies to the question of film editing.”
When professors plagiarize
Star academics get light punishments for lifting ideas
Photo by John Ulan Epic Photography Inc.
From the 21st Maclean’s University Rankings—on newsstands now. Story by Charlie Gillis.
Every university has them—prize-winning researchers, or profs who routinely get their faces on the late-night news. “Celebrity academics” are typically figures for a school to extol, but the reigning newsmaker at the University of Alberta won’t be gracing this year’s alumni brochures. Formerly the dean of U of A’s medical school, Philip Baker is now best known as the guy who plagiarized tracts of an address to graduates from an article he’d read in The New Yorker magazine. Baker lost his administrative position following an internal investigation. But he kept his job as a professor, and was expected back on campus in October.
Dalhousie abandons anti-plagiarism software
Victory for student groups
A majority of university presidents in the U.S. (55 per cent of them) say that plagiarism has increased in the past 10 years. Of those, 89 per cent blame the Internet, says a new study by Pew.
Many universities have fought back by using software like Turnitin, which forces students to upload their papers to be scanned against a database of published works, before their professors grade them. If passages appear to have been copied, the professor is informed and may investigate.
But profs at Dalhousie University learned this week that they no longer have access to the software, in part because papers were being stored on U.S. servers against the school’s wishes, Dwight Fischer, the school’s Chief Information Officer told the Toronto Star.
“We’re moving quickly to replace that system with something else,” said Fischer. “We’re not bailing on our academic integrity strategy. Students should not think that this is a retreat on what we hold dear and valuable here.”
Dalhousie University’s Student Union has long opposed Turnitin, partly because it presumes students are guilty before proven innocent. Some students were concerned that their intellectual property was being stored in the U.S. or copied and stored against their will.
McGill University student Jesse Rosenfeld won the right to submit his paper in person, instead of through Turnitin, after the university punished him for refusing to use the software in 2003.
Ryerson University uses Turnitin, but students can opt out if they make alternate arrangements.
Seven students at the University of King’s College were found guilty of plagiarism in December after fifteen papers had been flagged by Turnitin.
Prof says he will never pursue cheating again
Did outing cheaters lead to poor evaluations, lower raise?
On advice from the school, a young computer scientist at New York University has taken down a controversial blog post entitled Why I will never pursue cheating again.
After Panagiotis Ipeirotis accused 20 per cent of students in one of his classes of plagiarism, he ended up with much lower student-teacher evaluation scores than ever before, he wrote in the now removed blog post. He had discovered the cheating using software and many of the students confessed when confronted. He was proud to have done the right thing.
Then the low scores from students were cited in a performance review as justification for his smallest-ever pay raise.
“Was it worth it? Absolutely not,” he wrote, referring to the confrontation with students. “Not only [have] I paid a significant financial penalty for ‘doing the right thing’… teaching became annoying and tiring.”
He told Inside Higher Ed in an e-mail that the point he was trying to make was that “as educators, we should be focusing on making cheating impossible. Not through enforcement but by designing evaluation schemes that are much less amenable to cheating.” He suggested that replacing assignments with in-class competitions could eliminate the need to police students.
Regarding the low pay increse, Ingo Walter, a business school dean, wrote the following. “Faculty evaluation is based on a detailed annual review of research, teaching and service to the department, the university and the profession. This includes possible class-feedback consequences in plagiarism or cheating cases in course evaluations. Moreover, the course evaluation input of any student who has an honor code infraction is removed from consideration when evaluating teaching performance.”
Dean Baker resigns but remains a professor
University of Alberta dean accused of plagiarizing speech
The University of Alberta’s President, Indira Samarasekera, has announced that the Dean of Medicine and Dentistry has resigned after an investigation was launched into the fact that he copied parts of another man’s speech in an address he delivered to students last Friday. Dr. Philip Baker will remain at the university as a professor during the ongoing investigation, reports CTV News. Earlier in the week, the dean apologized to Atul Gawande, the man whose speech to Stanford University’s graduating class had “inspired” his own.
To read more Maclean’s On Campus coverage of the Dean Baker controversy, click here.
Leader has PhD yanked for plagiarism
German politician missed 120 footnotes
The University of Heidelberg has withdrawn the PhD of a notable German politician after a committee found plagiarism throughout her thesis, reports Deutsche Welle. The German school’s investigation found 120 passages without footnotes that should have been credited to other sources. Sivana Koch-Mehrin was vice president of the European Parliament and head of the German Free Democratic Party until she resigned last month over these now-proven allegations. The story comes as the University of Alberta investigates Dean Philip Baker’s speech to graduating medical students, in which he said he was “inspired” by another academic’s address.
Opinion: Four reasons Dean Baker should resign
Would you trust your cancer diagnosis to someone who had cheated on an exam?
This morning, the news broke that on Friday, Philip Baker, Dean of The Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry* at the University of Alberta, delivered a speech that was largely plagiarized from a speech given by Atwul Gawande last year at Stanford. Baker has issued an apology, but an apology is not good enough. He should resign immediately, and here’s why.
1. On principle. As Dean, Baker is responsible for the academic integrity of the programs he oversees. Deans are called upon every day to make decisions that impact students and faculty in the most basic ways: hirings, promotions, sabbaticals, grade appeals — it’s hard to think of an important university function that does not involve deans. Baker made a mistake, and he may feel bad about it, but he cannot now be trusted with the grades of students and the careers of faculty.
2. It sets an impossibly bad example. How can the university enforce its rules about plagiarism (for which students can be expelled according to U of A policies) when one of its own deans has admitted to plagiarism himself? What could a faculty member say to an offending student who points out that what he has done is no different from what his own dean has done? Is a professor of obstetrics supposed to look a student in the eye and say that students have to be held to higher standards than university officials?
3. The scandal may hurt students, the integrity of whose degree might be called into question.
4. “What I stole was really good” is no excuse. According to the Edmonton Journal, Baker’s apology suggested that while he did lift the content of the Gawande speech, it was only because the original oration “inspired me and resonated with my experiences[...] The personal medical traumas which I detailed were wholly genuine and did indeed engender the sense of inadequacy I highlighted.”
Such an excuse, though, is no excuse at all. For one thing, there are well-established ways of using the words of another in an ethical way: paraphrasing and quoting with attribution. If the Gawande speech was so inspiring, all Dean Baker had to do was say, “In thinking about my address today, I recalled a wonderful speech delivered at Stanford last year, in which Dr. Atwul Gawande said…” and so on. Why didn’t Baker do that? Because according to witnesses who read compared the two addresses, Baker lifted almost the whole thing, and to admit to that would be to look like you hadn’t written your own speech. Which, of course, he hadn’t. So he passed off a counterfeit.
But to do so at a university event, in his capacity as Dean, is to show a shocking disregard for a basic principle of academic integrity: you don’t knowingly take credit for someone else’s work.
Baker’s programs are in obstetrics and gynecology. Would you want your baby delivered by a doctor who hadn’t written her own papers? Ask yourself: would you want your cervical cancer diagnosed by someone who cheated on their oncology exam?
*This post originally referred to Dean Baker with an incorrect title. It has been corrected.
Dean accused of plagiarizing convocation speech
Students searching on smart-phones found near-identical speech
Dean Philip Baker of the University of Alberta has apologized to medical students after he lifted the “theme and content” of his address to the graduating class on Friday evening from another doctor’s speech. Those students are now accusing him of plagiarism, which is — ironically — the type of academic crime that would have prevented them from graduating.
Philip’s speech included many of the same type of anecdotes that Dr. Atul Gawande’s speech to Stanford University students in 2010 included, which graduates like Sarah Fung recognized during the speech. Their suspicions were confirmed when they checked The New Yorker magazine’s website using their smart-phones, reports the Edmonton Journal. Philip defended himself to students in a letter obtained by the newspaper, in which he said that Gawande’s words “inspired me and resonated with my experiences,” and that “the personal medical traumas which I detailed were wholly genuine.”
“We were embarrassed and disappointed to find that Dean Baker had given a wonderful speech at our graduation banquet without attributing it to the original author,” Brittany Barber, president of the graduating class told the Journal. ”People should know that we do not stand for academic dishonesty and our deepest wish is that this incident does not reflect poorly on the integrity of our class, the medical school, and ultimately the university.”
Baker, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology, has published more than 200 scientific articles and 14 books. A spokesperson for the university, Deb Hammacher, said there will be an investigation. Baker has apologized to Gawande.
To read Cape Breton University professor and On Campus blogger Todd Pettigrew’s commentary on the situation, please click here.
Busted!
Students are caught unintentionally plagiarizing all the time. Learn how to stay safe
You’re writing a paper and you find yourself on the horns of a dilemma: if you make up facts that show the world as you think it ought to be, that’s fabrication and you’re guilty of academic misconduct. On the other hand, if you do your research and find the foremost expert on the subject and repeat whatever he says word-for-word, that’s plagiarism and it’s also academic misconduct.
Come on! It hardly seems fair!
Joking aside, plagiarism is easy to commit accidentally, it’s easy for professors to detect, and it can have serious repercussions. Ignorance is no defense against a charge of plagiarism; at this stage in your academic career, you are expected to know what plagiarism is and how to avoid it.
Plagiarism, in a nutshell, is when a student takes someone else’s idea or their way of expressing an idea and passes it off as their own. (This plagiarism stuff is making me nervous. I admit it: I paraphrased this definition from the University of Toronto’s Code of Behaviour on Academic Matters.)
To make things extra weird and complicated, you can also plagiarize yourself if you take things from papers you’ve previously submitted without citing them, because all academic works are supposed to be original.
Why would students plagiarize themselves, or anyone else, for that matter? Most plagiarism is committed accidentally, or out of ignorance.
“Usually it’s because they are not aware of correct citation practices so they don’t include quotation marks, they don’t cite their sources correctly,” says University of Western Ontario ombudsperson Adrienne Clarke.
Citation practices vary from subject to subject and from university to university. There are several styles of citation you may be expected to use, such as the MLA system and the APA system. It is your responsibility to learn the expectations of your professor and your department, and to follow them. Most universities have websites on plagiarism and citation, and if you’re still not certain, ask your professor.
Even if you are aware of expectations, it’s still easy to make mistakes if you’re not careful. Clark gives a scenario of how an honest student could land up plagiarizing a source:
“A student is working on a paper. They have notes in front of them, with citations and page numbers on sticky notes. They are organizing them, putting them down, moving them around. They are taking information from different places and jotting down page numbers and references. And then when it comes to putting the final paper together, there has been some careless note taking, or they have put their stickies in a different order, and written down wrong page numbers or gotten sources confused, so that their final citation list is not correct.”
Alex Gillis, a journalism professor at Ryerson University, has also seen mistakes made by students with chaotic notes. “Get organized so that later you don’t inadvertently plagiarize by thinking ‘That’s a great sentence I wrote’ when it’s actually from the Village Voice or something.”
Yes, improper citation, committed with the best of intentions but without much attention to detail, is plagiarism, and could be considered academic misconduct. When you’re taking notes, it’s important to keep your sources straight so you don’t attribute the wrong source, or worse, mistake a quotation you jotted down as an original idea of your own.
Next: What’s another way students accidentally plagiarize?
Cheating hitting “epidemic” proportions, says prof
Up to 80 per cent of high school, 75 per cent of university students admit to cheating
According to the Canwest News Service, one educational policy professor says cheating among students is reaching “epidemic” proportions.
Speaking at the annual American Psychological Association conference last Saturday in Toronto, Eric Anderman, professor of educational policy and leadership at Ohio State University said the problem is widespread and growing. He said some studies show that up to 80 per cent of high-achieving high school students and 75 per cent of college students admit to cheating.
Previous studies by the American Psychological Association show cheating is relatively infrequent in elementary school, but increases as students become teens and progress through high school.
Home-town graduation for class of cheaters
Cheaters may not win, but they don’t necessarily lose either
This is a pick-up from RYS (one of my favorite sites) of a story from The Columbus Dispatch. This story is equal parts heartwarming tale of small town folks doing good for their kids and stomach churning example of what’s wrong with education today.
The short version is this. At a small town high school a good half the graduating class was either guilty of cheating on their final tests or else complicit in the widespread cheating. Some enterprising hacker managed to get a hold of the tests and they got passed around. Seems like there might be another interesting story in the background here (a lot of “hacking” just means that some administrator had a criminally stupid password) but this story isn’t about the theft. It’s about the decision on the part of the high school to cancel graduation. With so much of the class implicated in academic misconduct I guess it just seemed like the thing to do. I agree with the decision.
Apparently parents disagreed. So they held their own graduation. Everyone pulled together in that movie-of-the-week sort of way to show the kids just how special they are – cheaters and all. Except the hacker, that is. And really, as far as I’m concerned, he’s the only one who demonstrated any particular ability in the midst of this mess. But like I said that’s another story.
The real issue here (as the good folks at RYS surely appreciate) is that you can’t go around rewarding kids for cheating. Even those that didn’t cheat (and I admit, they got the roughest deal here) were treated to ringside tickets to exactly the last lesson they should be learning prior to any post-secondary adventures that may be in their futures. And that lesson is that cheaters may not win but they don’t really lose either. They may be embarrassed for a bit and have to endure some scolding, but at the end of the day things will work out and all will be forgiven.
I’ll spare you all my iteration of the consequences of academic misconduct at the university level but suffice it to say that the consequences are serious indeed. Students at Centerburg High School may be happy they had their special graduation after all but much like students everywhere they don’t necessarily realize what they most need to learn. One missed ceremony is the cheapest price I can imagine to drive home the seriousness of this issue. If that lesson could have saved even one student from dealing with this down the road that would have been worth it. But there you go. Parents may not appreciate what lessons their kids need to learn either.
Props to the administration at Centerburg High. It’s nice to know that someone is still taking a principled stand.
Simon Fraser to flag academic dishonesty on transcripts
Repeat plagiarists and cheaters would get an “FD” grade, could lose their degree
The senate and board of governors of Simon Fraser University say they have approved “significant and extensive” changes to the school’s policies concerning dishonesty and student misconduct.
Included in the changes is a new mark – FD – which will indicate that a student was failed for reasons of academic dishonesty. This means that a plagiarized essay or serious case of cheating could follow students around throughout the rest of their academic careers.
“The FD grade will be available to department chairs who feel that a student’s behavior warrants a severe penalty, usually because they are repeat violators,” says Rob Gordon, director of the school’s criminology department. “A chair may also request the imposition of more severe penalties through the University Board on Student Discipline such as suspension and the rescinding of a degree.”
The changes were the result of a university-wide, three-year investigation by Simon Fraser’s senate committee on academic integrity in student learning and evaluation, otherwise known as SCAISLE. The committee was struck in fall 2005 after a series of incidents concerning academic dishonesty were identified, and the school commissioned a report.
That report found that 63 per cent of faculty and 41 per cent of teaching assistants and tutor markers surveyed at Simon Fraser had ignored suspected cases of cheating. This included cases of falsifying lab data, “recycling” of labs, fabrication of bibliographies, extensive plagiarism in papers, homework copying, illegal group work, and copying on exams.
Calling the policy “a zero-tolerance approach both in theory and in practice,” Gordon says the school aimed to create a fair, consistent and effective new policy on matter concerning academic integrity. “We believe the combination of policies, procedures and strategies we’ve come up with will do that.”
As of May 1, the new policy includes a “Code of Academic Integrity and Good Conduct,” which includes a summary of expectations for students around issues of academic honesty and personal behaviour. This includes prohibitions against hazing, bullying, disclosing confidential information and possessing guns on campus.
“We now have a single student code of conduct that covers both academic integrity and good-conduct issues,” says Gordon. “And we’ve created a reporting system with a central record keeping mechanism so we can better detect multiple offenders across campuses and departments.”
NY Columbia professor accused of plagiarism is dismissed
A Columbia University professor who garnered international attention after a noose was discovered hanging from her office door last fall has been fired over allegations of plagiarism, according to a report from the Associated Press. Administrators at Columbia’s Teacher’s College said in a letter to faculty Monday that they had rejected professor Madonna G. Constantine’s [...]
A Columbia University professor who garnered international attention after a noose was discovered hanging from her office door last fall has been fired over allegations of plagiarism, according to a report from the Associated Press.
Administrators at Columbia’s Teacher’s College said in a letter to faculty Monday that they had rejected professor Madonna G. Constantine’s appeal of the plagiarism charges.
Bill Anderson, a spokesman for Teachers College, said Constantine had been terminated, but that she could challenge the dismissal.
Constantine was sanctioned in February after an investigation found she used others’ work without attribution in papers she published in academic journals. She was allowed to keep her job and to appeal the ruling.
The AP reports that police are still investigating the noose incident. It was left on her office door last October 9.
Need to cheat? On a budget? Visit Essaybay
York student journalist finds he can get an essay written for as little as $100. Writers claim to be grads of Harvard, Oxford; promise a “B”
You can sell your slightly-damaged futon to the highest bidder on Ebay–and use the money to pay the lowest bidder to write your university course essay, on Essaybay.com.
The web-based service is the latest spin on university cheating, offering custom-made, university-level essays. It works kind of like the tender process that businesses and government use for major contracts: Users post descriptions of the product they are looking for, and others respond with bids to produce the requested essay. Bidders state their price and their qualifications; the individual student decides which bidder they believe is most qualified, and entrust them essay to them.
As York University student journalist Flynn Daunt discovered, even a clearly ridiculous essay request brought multiple offers, at rock-bottom prices, from people claiming the highest qualifications. Flynn went on Essaybay.com and posted that he needed a 1,750 word essay, and had to earn at least a “B.” His topic: “America’s War on Mustaches.”
“Within a few days there were seven bids from writers claiming to be graduates from acclaimed schools such as Oxford and Harvard,” wrote Flynn in the Excalibur, York’s student paper. “The bids had a price range from just over $100 to about $400.”
Essaybay says, however, that it is not engaging in cheating. According to Jed Hallam, Essaybay’s public relations manager, the service is in fact improving the “custom essay industry” by “increasing the transparency of the process.” He says
“It is ridiculous to suggest that using our service as a study aid is cheating,” Hallam told the Excalibur, “and this suggestion is merely a way for universities and colleges to reflect blame for poor assessment methods.”
Right. Got it. All we really want to know is, how much would a paper taking this line of reasoning cost on EssayBay? “Student X requires an argumentative essay with the following title: ‘Putting your name on a paper you didn’t write is not cheating.’ Length: 2,000 words. Required Grade: A”
At least it’s better than the sex trade
For 120 pounds, he’ll do your assignment
The Nouse, the student newspaper at UK’s York University, writes about a student who runs a "essay consultancy" firm. Basically, he writes essays for other students.
The student in question makes a good point that he’s not breaking any rules – it is the student submitting the essay that’s breaking the rules.
What I truly find disturbing is that the writer seems to really enjoy essay writing.
