Plagiarism is on the rise everywhere. Just Google it. Australian authorities even did some ethical hacking to determine the actual scale of the practice. To their horror, good students from well reputed universities were buying papers. Australia has just passed a law to ban thesis/essay writing services. UK just stopped one essay writing service from claiming that its services are kosher because the essays are written by alumni and staff of universities. In Malaysia, Malaysian Qualifications Agency has been raising the spectre of rising plagiarism among universities but most HEIs tend to treat it as regular mischief. A strong public statement is on MQA website
Not all universities have a strong plagiarism programme - educate, inform, detect and discipline. Most have an innocuous statement buried in the academic regulations or the handbook. On plagiarism, many don’t understand that Turnitin and similar services are just text matching services. The index is a measure of originality. Staff have to decide whether the plagiarism rules have been violated. For this, a clear policy with adequate guides on the procedures and the different punishments that can be meted out must be laid out for administrators and staff. The policy is not visibly coordinated among all faculties. Staff who have taken a strong stand against plagiarism have in number of occasions been told off by their university administrators as being too sensitive. Plagiarism cannot be strongly enforced in an environment where university staff practices in writing, researching and publishing are also suspect. Gift authorships and free riding authors are are common. It is, in fact, becoming a policy that supervisors earn their authorship rights by guiding their supervisees!
The proofreading services are just a front. Most of their work would not fall under the rubric of proofreading. Editors have bemoaned that they just cannot edit. Its too badly written to edit. They rewrite the text because that is the only way they can fix the sentence. It must be rewritten which goes into plagiarism territory. On thesis writing, many universities do not bother to ensure their students are able to write clearly and cogently by the time they graduate. . Even in UK university non-native PhD graduates have difficulty writing and speaking decently in English after graduating. The same issue has been raised among the big 8 in Australia by academic researchers from Deakin University. Asking to lower English requirement will only add to this problem. Many foreign students have poor command of the English language and need longer time to develop adequate proficiency. Recall the Middle Eastern PhD student in management from a northern university in Malaysia who could not speak in English in the court much to the surprise of the judge. There is a rush to graduate under-baked graduates to meet Graduate-in-time targets. This mindset unwittingly helps the so called proofreading services. One colleague of mine who owns condos in Cyberjaya, Malaysia said that her tenants’ job is full time thesis writing and they seem to be doing pretty well.
Its not just a language issue. Many students are hiring data analyst to work their data and write up the findings chapter. All around our universities you will find adverts of these services. I even saw a flyer from statistics faculty service centre offering different types of data analytic services to post graduate students! Our examiners are not pushing the candidates to ensure that the thesis - every chapter is actually written by the students. Examiners are also accepting the idea that the thesis may not be solely the work of the candidate. The problem identification or gap is work of the supervisor or the grant holder. The design, method and analysis are partaked by others including the supervisor. Even when theses are found to be plagiarized, our punishments show how lightly we view this academic crime. Its usually a tap on the finger.
Its good that the media has raised this but will it change. Business as usual is the most likely outcome unless the strong stance is translated into programme of action in universities, public and private. For now universities just follow the SOP.
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