Plagiarism festers as varsities push to raise rankings

Universiti Malaya lecturer Dr Moses Samuel says the students must be punished if they copy and pasted others’ work. – The Malaysian Insider pic by Kamal Ariffin, April 14, 2015.

Pressure to raise global rankings of local universities has inevitably encouraged the growth of plagiarism in local universities, with lecturers reporting as many as half of all assignments showing clear signs of copying.

With the help of online detection tools such as turnitin.com, lecturers are now able to spot cases of copying in assignments, said Universiti Selangor (Unisel) Communications and Media lecturer Hazween Syarina Md Hassan.

She said the website’s search engine was able to return a percentage score of how much a paper’s content has been plagiarised, adding that she has had instances where half of the students in a class had submitted work that was 50% plagiarised.

“It’s something worrying when half of a class submits assignments where 50% of the content comes from somewhere else,” she said.

Hazween said she had come across work that scored 80% to 90% on turnitin.com.

“Up to 90% is virtually copying wholesale someone else’s work,” she said, adding that a score of 35% and above would not be passed.

When in the past, lecturers could more freely punish copycats by failing them, educators are now finding it difficult to come down hard on offenders.

Being too strict would mean many students won’t make the cut, said Hazween.

She said this made administrators, who were worried about the university’s pass rates, uncomfortable.

“It’s not much you can do if (administrators) find that your pass rates are low and fail rates are high,” she told The Malaysian Insider.

“There is pressure to pass or they question how come so many students are failing.”

Universiti Malaya lecturer Dr Moses Samuel said the copy-pasting problem would be exacerbated if students were not punished as they did not realise the seriousness of their offence.

“Many do not realise that it’s the same as stealing. That someone else’s ideas are their own property,” said the lecturer who has been with UM’s Education faculty for 36 years.

While Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (Utar) has a zero-tolerance policy on plagiarism, 22-year-old Lee U Hau said some lecturers were known to be more lenient.

“It depends on how strict a lecturer is. Some also ‘close one eye’, if it is not too flagrant,” said Lee.

Local universities have come under harsh criticism due to our poor showing in global rankings, despite Second Education Minister Datuk Seri Idris Jusoh's assertion that Malaysia's higher education was now on a par with those of developed nations, including the United Kingdom, Germany and Australia.

Idris had said this was proven by the fact that 135,000 foreign students made up 10% of students at national institutions of higher education in the country.

- TMI