News | Sunday, 14 December 2008

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We’re producing plagiarists, University Ombudsman says

Karl Schembri
The new University Ombudsman, Prof. Charles Farrugia, has complained that the educational system is encouraging plagiarism from an early age.
In an interview with MaltaToday, Prof. Farrugia says plagiarism is on the increase as the internet is tempting young children to just copy and paste their school projects.
“We are training our students from a very young age to plagiarise. I look at my nephews, who are always given projects at school. They go on Google, upload images and websites, everything is cut and paste, print and the project is ready. And they get good grades. So we are giving the impression very early in our educational system that there’s nothing wrong with copying other people’s work and presenting it as if it was yours. The system is encouraging that mentality.”
Prof. Farrugia cites as an example his own experience of dealing with a university student who copied a full thesis.
“The most ludicrous case of plagiarism I have ever come across was when I was pro-Rector in charge of students’ discipline. I had this student who was accused of plagiarising his thesis. We faced him with the charge; we told him ‘you’ve copied all your thesis, word for word’. His answer was: ‘Why did you bring me here? That thesis was too good, I couldn’t write anything better’.”
A scourge probably as old as academia, the blatant copying of chunks of texts in students’ assignments and theses is known to have been on the rise worldwide since the advent of internet, making the detection of copied work more difficult, although new sophisticated software is developing to scrutinise their work.
In fact, the same technology is now offering efficient ways of policing students’ works. Besides specialised software, Prof. Farrugia says Google itself – the popular search engine that is abused by plagiarising students – is efficient in detecting plagiarised assignments.
Research on plagiarism done in 2002 in five Australian universities found that 8.8% of works submitted contained more than 25% of unattributed material downloaded from the internet.
In the US, more than half of high-school students admitted plagiarising from the internet in a 2001 national survey of 4,500 students conducted by a Rutgers University professor.

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