The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Nipping plagiarism in the bud TEACHING & LEARNING

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Wednesday, Nov 04, 2009
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Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Nipping plagiarism in the bud TEACHING & LEARNING

Aishhwariya Subramanian

CHENNAI: Plagiarism may not be a new phenomenon amongst college students but it has become more widespread due to the advent of the Internet. However, the very same platform is now actively providing educators and students tools to nip plagiarism in the bud.

Plagiarism - using someone else’s content without citing the source - has become as easy as copy and pasting data with your mouse. Websites such as echeat.com and cliffnotes, to name only a few, have made it easier for students to simply “google” the topic they want to research and get information. In fact, cliffnotes has free web content in subjects ranging from maths to politics to science to philosophy.

Ironically, the website named echeat proudly proclaims that “It’s not cheating, it’s collaborating.” However, the most popular choice, especially for Indian students, is still Wikipedia.

“I don’t really think copying information from the Internet for class assignments is actually plagiarism. If someone were to publish copied material in a book or an article, only then does it become plagiarism,” says Divya Nair, a postgraduate student from Anna University.

The veracity of content available online is highly questionable as anyone can upload any “information.” But many students today don’t see anything wrong with the whole process. “I have on occasions directly copied from websites,” admits Sumitra, a student of MOP Vaishnav College for Women.

“I feel guilty at times because at the end of the day, you are lifting someone else’s work. But I make sure I lift from many websites. This way I feel like I have actually done some qualitative research and it is harder to trace. None of my classmates have ever been caught for plagiarising. But I am sure the professors know about this,” she adds.

Stella Maris College Economics professor Crystal David says that if a teacher is well read, he or she can easily spot work that has been plagiarised. “When I find out a student has plagiarised work, I usually cancel the project completely. However, students doing their undergraduation are usually given a second chance,” says Dr.David. But, the problem does not simply lie with the students themselves.

“I myself have on several occasions confronted my peers who themselves have plagiarised content from well known journals.”

But for every website that “helps” a student lift information blatantly, there is always another one that tracks plagiarised content. Some of the best known are articlechecker.com, plagiarismdetect.com and copyscape.com. Some websites also make it difficult to plagiarise content by disabling the right click option for copying text.

The problem in India lies more in the attitude of the students and teachers. Sneha Krishnan, studying at Oxford, says that students face severe penalties if caught cheating or copying content. Psychologist ShriDevi Sudharshan feels that the fault for students turning in unscrupulous work lies with parental figures.

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