Forget plagiarism: there’s a brand new and bigger threat to academic integrity.
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Academic plagiarism is no more just sloppy “cut and paste” jobs paper writers for hire or students cribbing large chunks of an assignment from a friend’s earlier essay on the same topic. These days, students can visit any of simply a number of paper or essay mills that litter the world-wide-web and get a completed assignment to present as their own.
These businesses that are shadowy not going away anytime soon. Paper mills can’t be easily shut or policed down by legislation. And there’s a trickier issue at play here: they supply a service which an alarming amount of students will happily use.
Managing this form that is newest of academic deceit will need hard work from established academia and a renewed commitment to integrity from university communities.
Unmasking the “shadow scholar”
In November 2010, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article that rocked the world that is academic. Its anonymous author confessed to having written significantly more than 5000 pages of scholarly work per year on the part of university students. Ethics was on the list of issues that are many author had tackled for clients.
The practice continues five years on. At a conference about plagiarism held in the Czech Republic in June 2015, one speaker revealed that as much as 22% of students in a few australian programmes that are undergraduate admitted to purchasing or going to buy assignments on the net.
In addition emerged that the paper mill business was booming. One site claims to get two million hits each month for the 5000 free papers that are downloadable. Another allows cheats to electronically interview the individuals who can write their papers. Some even claim to use university professors to make sure the quality of work.
An example of among the many paper mills that a simple Google search brings up.
Policing and legislation becomes quite difficult since the company assignments that are selling be domiciled in the US while its “suppliers”, the ghostwriters, are based elsewhere in the field. The client, a university student, could possibly be anywhere in the world – New York City, Lagos, London, Nairobi or Johannesburg.
No quick fixes
In the event that companies and writers are typical shadows, how can paper mills be stopped? The answers most likely lie with university students – and with the academics who teach them.
The anonymous writer whose paper mill tales shocked academia explained into the piece which types of students were utilizing these types of services and just simply how much they were happy to pay. During the right period of writing, he was making about US$66,000 annually. His three main client groups were students for whom English is a moment language; students who are struggling academically and people who will be lazy and rich.
His criticism is stinging:
I live well regarding the desperation, misery, and incompetence that the system that is educational has.
Ideally, lecturers in the system of which he’s so dismissive should know their students and therefore be able to detect abnormal patterns of work. But with large undergraduate classes of 500 students or higher, this amount of engagement is impossible. The ability for greater direct engagement with students rises at postgraduate levels as class sizes drop.
Academics should also carefully design their ways of assessment because these could serve to deter students from buying assignments and dissertations. Again, this program is much more feasible with smaller amounts of postgraduate students and live dissertation defences.
It isn’t foolproof. Students may still make the time to familiarise themselves with all the contents associated with the documents they’ve bought so that they can respond to questions without exposing their dishonesty.
In the conference, some academics suggested that students should write assignments on templates furnished by their university which will track when work is undertaken so when it’s incorporated to the document. However, this type of remedy continues to be being developed.
There is certainly another problem with calling on academics alone to tackle plagiarism. Research suggests that many may themselves be guilty of the same offence or may ignore their students’ dishonesty because they feel investigating plagiarism takes time that is too much.
It has additionally been proved that cheating behaviour thrives in environments where you will find few or no consequences. But perhaps herein lies an answer which could assist in addressing the nagging issue of plagiarism and paper mills.
Universities exist to advance thought leadership and development that is moral society.
As a result, their academics must certanly be role models and must promote ethical behaviour within the academy. There must be a zero tolerance policy for academics who cheat. Extensive instruction must be provided to students concerning the pitfalls of cheating as well as needs to be taught ways to improve their academic writing skills.
Universities must develop a culture of integrity and keep maintaining this through ongoing dialogue about the values on which academia is dependent. They also need to develop institutional responsibility that is moral really examining how student cheating is dealt with, confronting academics’ resistance to reporting and coping with such cheating, and taking a challenging stand on student teaching.
Then institutional values will become internalised and practised as the norm if this is done well. Developing cultures that are such determined leadership at senior university levels.
