Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Cribbing, copying, cheating. In Roget’s Thesaurus, plagiarism comes under theft, and there’s little sympathy for those accused of stealing other people’s work and presenting it as their own.
“But that’s not what I did,” says Angela Brodie (not her real name), who graduated from Sheffield University, England, with a class 2:2 degree this year. She was accused of plagiarism, and a key essay was downgraded. “I was right on the borderline between a 2:2 and a 2:1 — it meant I dropped a class on my degree,” she says.
Plagiarism is acknowledged to be a major problem on university campuses throughout the world. The Internet has made it all too easy to download someone else’s work and present it as your own.
But Brodie did not download an essay and present it as her own. Nor did she copy from another student, or quote extensively from a source without crediting the author. What she did will be familiar to many students who find themselves hard pressed to finish work on time. “I over-relied on one source,” she concedes. “There wasn’t enough original content.”
The UK’s National Union of Students (NUS), vice-president, Wes Streeting, is becoming familiar with the problem. “We are coming across an increasing number of cases where students have been accused of plagiarism when it’s not obvious that the accusation is justified,” he says.
“A big problem is that students are not being told what plagiarism is, or how to avoid it. Students may be referencing an author in the bibliography, but not in footnotes. We are also being told of huge differences in the way that departments within the same university are dealing with the issue.”
Ian Beak (not his real name) has just graduated from Birmingham University, England. He was accused of plagiarism in his second year. Two diagrams in an essay had not been footnoted in the text.
“They were referenced in the bibliography, but not on the page. I was accused of plagiarism, which I wasn’t very happy about. I wasn’t given the opportunity to discuss it; the accusation was made and I had marks deducted, which caused me to fail the module,” explains Beak.
These two cases share another common element — both students were dealt with informally within their departments. Both claim they were discouraged from appealing against the judgement. “I was also told that if I entered a formal appeal it would go on my record,” says Beak.
Brodie says she was told that if she took the matter further it might distract her during her final exams. In their correspondence Brodie’s lecturer wrote: “You could also raise the matter with your tutor and with student services, but these last courses of action are rather risky as they mean the charge might end up formally recorded on your student record.”
Brodie did take the matter further, but after being told by the university that there were no grounds for an appeal, she is now in the process of taking the case to the higher education ombudsman. A central element of that appeal will be the fact that she had e-mailed a draft copy of the essay to her lecturer, who told her it was “good...and on the right tracks”.
“Where a student has been accused of misconduct, it’s totally unacceptable for them to be deterred from going through an appeals process,” says Streeting. “This is about natural justice and, in a worrying number of cases, institutions do not appear to be adhering to the principles of natural justice.”
Both Sheffield and Birmingham Universities have robust policies on plagiarism. Both produce guidance for students: Birmingham will launch an interactive course for students next month, which will use interactive quizzes and videos to provide an introduction to the issue of plagiarism.
A spokesperson for Birmingham University agrees that most plagiarism cases are dealt with by individual departments, though students have the right to ask a third party to assess the case. “The university does not wish to see its students caught up in plagiarism through a lack of guidance or understanding. It tries very hard to ensure this does not happen,” says the spokesperson.
Sheffield declined to comment on Brodie’s case. A spokesperson said the university had a system of appeals and referred to departmental guidance on plagiarism. This refers extensively to a report by the Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc) on plagiarism produced last year. That report — Deterring, Detecting and Dealing with Student Plagiarism — said: “Many studies show that the bulk of plagiarism can be attributed to students who do not understand academic requirements.”
Guidance issued by Jisc after the report recommended that universities run compulsory taught courses on essay-writing and attribution, setting out how footnotes and bibliographies ought to be used. Sheffield refers to that guidance in its policy document, but Brodie claims she had no tuition on the subject. Beak — who has set up a website to collate other students’ experiences of accusations of plagiarism (theplagiarist.org.uk) — also claims that the implications of failing to footnote a piece of work fully had never been spelt out to him. “I don’t remember ever being given a guide as to how to reference work,” he says. “Lecturers seemed to assume that we knew how to do this.”
Some academics believe that low-level plagiarism of this kind is inevitable.
A spokesperson for Universities UK, the organisation of university principals, says: “It is fair to say that there is an ongoing debate about what constitutes plagiarism and how cases should be handled.”
— The Guardian
