No more copying or padding up assignments
with information off the net. A new UGC guideline asks institutions to
set up committees to cross check for copying
THOUGH PLAGIARISM WILL NOW BE PUNISHABLE UNDER THE NEW UGC GUIDELINES, IT IS NOT A LEGAL OFFENCE
It starts with copying homework from a classmate at school because you
were too lazy to do yours. Then you begin copying a few lines from
Wikipedia to pad up an assignment.
For a disturbingly large number of Indian students, plagiarism – the
practice of taking someone else’s idea or work and passing it as your
own – is part of academic life. It’s ignored by school and college until
almost the post-graduate level, where regulations are stricter.
Now, the University Grants Commission (UGC) is taking active steps to
promote academic integrity and prevent plagiarism in academics. A set of
rules drafted last month make it necessary for higher education
institutes across the country to set up an Academic Misconduct Panel to
investigate assignments and projects submitted, for plagiarism.
The panel will comprise faculty, MPhil (master of philosophy) and PhD
(doctor of philosophy) students. “Every student submitting a thesis,
dissertation, term papers, reports or any other such documents to the
higher education institution shall submit an undertaking indicating that
the document has been prepared by him or her and that the document is
his/her original work and free of any plagiarism,” reads the draft.
The draft also recommends that institutes conduct awareness programmes
each semester to teach students and staff the importance of proper
attribution of information, seeking permission of the author where
necessary, acknowledgement of source compatible with the needs and
specificities of disciplines.
Teachers welcome the move. “The education system gives Indian students
very little time to research,” believes Kanchana Mahadevan, head of the
department of philosophy at Mumbai University. Students end up not
realising that they need to use the right sources and credit it when
using material from the web and another person’s work. As Uday Salunkhe,
group director of WeSchool, Matunga puts it, “Most students have no
idea of the seriousness of the consequences. It has become the new
normal.”
WHOSE LINE IS IT ANYWAY?
When Raj*, 23, was writing an essay to get admission in a humanities
course in the UK, he took a couple of paragraphs from an essay online to
impress the university with his language skills. “I figured that
universities abroad get thousands of applications and won’t have no time
to check mine for plagiarism,” he says. “I was terribly wrong. I got
caught and was blacklisted from the university and lost a year. I learnt
my lesson the hard way.”
Mahadevan of Mumbai University has encountered student plagiarism on a
few occasions. “The students in these cases were looking for short-cuts
[since they had not attended class regularly] and instant appreciation,”
she says. “They didn’t even realise that plagiarism is ethically
unacceptable.” It was only during classroom presentation of the
assignments, when their peers presented creative and original work, that
they realized what they had done.