IPPN

Published: 07 April 2009

Source: independent.ie

By Caitrina Cody


Tuesday April 07 2009

GROWING numbers of college students are using the internet to plagiarise course work, according to a leading academic.

Dublin City University President Ferdinand von Prondzynski said the web had transformed plagiarism into an industry, making material available to confused students at the click of a mouse.

Writing on his blog, he said that in the past plagiarism "required a fair amount of effort if it was to pass muster -- it was necessary for the miscreant to seek out a library, or a bookshop, or the help of somebody more expert".

Nowadays all that had changed, thanks to students who were plundering the rich resources of online journals in the hope of better grades.

Intentionally

But many students were not intentionally cheating, said Prof von Prondzynski, and were simply confused about the rules surrounding plagiarism.

"As an external examiner in another college, I encountered one student who had no idea that he was plagiarising another person's work," he said.

"I asked all the other examiners how much of it they felt was going on and, at a guess, they felt that around 10pc of the material passing through their hands had been plagiarised."

The DCU president recalled another incident in a different college when he reviewed the work of one student after it had been graded by another examiner. "As I read it, it seemed very familiar to me . . . and rightly so, as I had written it myself," he said. "He had lifted a whole chapter from a book I had written a few years earlier and presented it as his work.

"What amused me even more was that the two internal examiners hadn't noticed the plagiarism and gave the student's effort (in reality, word for word my own work) a mark of 58pc," said Prof von Prondzynski.

The academic said that better communication was needed in universities to help students understand how to avoid plagiarising while still using other sources in their essays.

"Many who plagiarise don't do so in a spirit of malice, but feel it is the educational counterpart to tax evasion -- naughty, but almost heroic," he said.

"But the downside is that it gives rise to an atmosphere of suspicion and forces examiners to waste time looking for plagiarism. It means they begin to mistrust students of average ability when they hand in better-than-average papers."

- Caitrina Cody