The Higher Education Commission’s recent efforts to increase the research output of Pakistani universities has resulted in an increasing number of publications in reputed journals and conferences (a comparison of recent research output of Bangladesh, Pakistan and India is available here). However, this success has also been accompanied with increasing instances of plagiarism involving Pakistani Professors and students. HEC deserves praise for its swift and strict response to these cases.
In the last couple of years, a number of online services and software have become available for plagiarism detection. An evaluation of available anti-plagiarism services conducted by the Claremont McKenna College is available online. However, till now, the subject of plagiarism and its automatic detection was not systematically studied by the academia itself. This has finally changed, with the announcement of the first “International Competition on Plagiarism Detection“. The competition carries a prize of 500 Euros, and will be hosted by the PAN workshop under the Annual Conference of the Spanish Society for Natural Language Processing 2009.
The competition divides into two tasks:
- External Plagiarism Analysis.
Given a set of suspicious documents and a set of source documents the task is to find all text passages in the suspicious documents which have been plagiarized and the corresponding text passages in the source documents.- Intrinsic Plagiarism Analysis.
Given a set of suspicious documents the task is to identify all plagiarized text passages, e.g., by detecting writing style breaches. The comparison of a suspicious document with other documents is not allowed in this task.We (the competition organizers) have created a large-scale corpus of artificial plagiarism. A random plagiarist has been employed to create the corpus. Given a text, the plagiarist decides whether or not he will plagiarize, from which documents he will plagiarize, how many passages will be plagiarized, and for each plagiarized passage of which type and length it will be. The type of a plagiarized passage may either be obfuscated plagiarism or translated plagiarism. The random plagiarist attempts to obfuscate his plagiarism by applying a random sequence of text operations such as shuffling a word, deleting a word, inserting a word from an external source, or replacing a word with a synonym, antonym, hypernym, or hyponym.
I think this competition is an excellent idea. Cheap and widely available automatic plagiarism services will greatly help resource-starved universities in curbing this practice.
While laudable, research into this subject will likely take years to materialize into useful tools to deincentivize plagiarism. And as cryptographers have found, increasing sophistication in safe-guards usually results in increasing sophistication in evasion techniques.
Plagiarism is rife in academic institutions *today* at the undergraduate level. The problem seems to persist because of apathy from administrators and chronic denial of the problem, both stemming from an irrational fear of ‘bad exposure’. The fact that professors have been caught plagiarizing research is symptomatic of a culture that lets it slide from early on in an individual’s academic life.
University leadership, primarily, and HEC should take more aggressive steps, not only to study the degree of the problem, but also to severely penalize this sort of behavior.
Well if you want to go into the root causes of plagiarism, then lack of respect of the law and merit in the Pakistani society surely play there part. Honesty is definitely not the best policy in Pakistan. Almost every person/student sees this in their daily lives.
I do not mean to say that educational institutions should use this argument as an excuse to allow plagiarism. However, educations institutions can’t exist outside of society, and they will be affected by it. I think recent movement in Pakistan for rule of law, both by the civil society and the media will positively impact the Pakistani society and therefore the Pakistani institutions over time. A positive sign is a recent resignation of an MNA for sending someone else to give a exam on his behalf (http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/09-nawaz-asks-mna-to-resign-in-examination-scandal-szh–10)
I disagree somewhat. Broadening the discussion to the general law and order situation in Pakistan is a misdirection. While reforming law and order is an immensely difficult problem, introducing policies to curb plagiarism in universities is not nearly as difficult: penalties need to be instituted and their enforcement needs to be ensured.
In any case, universities are supposed to be training grounds for future generations. They preempt what society is going to look like in a generation. If students in schools and universities are taught that plagiarism and dishonesty have consequences early, might the general law and order situation eventually improve as well? I don’t think the current situation should be used as an excuse to concede the future.
I disagree with your disagreement. Universities do not exist in a void and their culture (in my opinion) is no more than a microcosm of the overall culture of the region even though the former is composed of a highly selective part of the latter. If the society does not have regard for the law in general, it is hard to expect a part of the same society to follow the rules in universities especially if those rules make a path difficult than usual. The lack of law and order in the society also enables those who do not like to live by the rules to put pressure on (read threaten) the enforcers who also have to survive in the same society.
Will identifying the guilty parties stop the practice in a shame-oriented (Eastern) society? I do not think so.
Anthropologists tells us that Western societies are guilt-oriented. As such, the concept of breaking the law is self-evident in these societies. Eastern societies, on the other hand, are shame-based societies where shame is a reaction to other people’s criticism of one’s action.
Applying that principle to the sin of plagiarism, in a Western society proving guilt is usually a strong-enough deterrent. Not so in our Eastern society. There, if the sin is to be eliminated from the society, it is necessary to prove guilt but also shame the guilty .
This leads me to conclude that the most meaningful efforts to rid our academic institutions of plagiarism will involve creating a social stigma attached to cheating. Not an easy thing to do, but do-able nonetheless.
At GIKI there was an effort in this vein, circa 1998-99. A “Pledge of Honor” was made available to students at a main campus meeting place. Students could take that pledge and sign their names on the giant poster, or they could ignore it. If they took the pledge, they would post a sticker on the dorm doors with the statement of the pledge on it.
That one poster, which was posted anonymously, started a great conversation on the subject with a significant number of students (probably not a majority but close) voluntarily taking the pledge. This pledge, in a way, became their shield against having to provide ‘chappas’ as well as a source of shame if/when they had their moment of weakness.
I think that grass-root efforts like these have a better potential of success than anything that simply exposes the guilty parties and hands down tough punishments. Especially, if the efforts are handed down by the university administration or worse, the HEC. I believe that university administrations can complement these types of efforts by enforcing stricter penalties for those engaged in gross misconduct.
Of course, none of this means that there should be no efforts made to catch the guilty students (and now instructors!). Just that the focus should be on using society’s indigenous mechanisms, rather than relying on bureaucratic reforms handed down from Islamabad. HEC can (and must) punish individual and significant cases of plagiarism, but it cannot end the culture of plagiarism.
PS: I tend to agree with all three of you — Omar and Khurram are correct that universities do not exist in a vacuum. But, Yaser is also right, in that universities are a good place to start building a better society for the future.