
A major plagiarism controversy that recently
erupted in the mechanical engineering
department of Ohio University (OU) has
American universities—particularly
colleges of engineering—grappling
with a thorny set of ethics questions
concerning one of the capital offenses
in academic scholarship: plagiarism.
Some questions are basic: What constitutes
plagiarism? Others are, perhaps, more
nuanced: When it occurs in a master’s
thesis, does it matter where in the document
the theft appears? Is it the responsibility
of faculty advisers to ensure their students’
papers are plagiarism-free—and should
they likewise face punishment if they
fail? Are foreign graduate students more
susceptible to committing the crime, either
because of cultural influences, poor command
of English or both? Finally, there’s
the question of whether other engineering
departments at other schools also have
hidden plagiarism infestations. “This
is a discussion the discipline needs to
have,” says Dennis Irwin, dean of
Ohio’s College of Engineering.
Ohio’s
plagiarism scandal, which has garnered
national attention, so far involves the
master’s theses of 34 former students,
most of them from overseas. It’s
also led to the disciplining of two engineering
academics, including the department’s
long-serving and much-honored chairman
(who earlier this year resigned from that
post). The problem came to light when
a former grad student in the department
began reading published theses on file
at the school’s library. He was
looking for inspiration for his own stalled
paper; what he found instead was an awful
lot of egregious borrowing of copy with
precious little attribution. Last May,
a review panel reported finding “rampant
and flagrant” plagiarism in many
mechanical engineering theses, going back
two decades. The suspect papers were filled
with many pages of material swiped from
not only previous theses but textbooks
and software manuals.
Jay Gunasekera, the former department
chairman who has the title of “distinguished
professor,” could not be reached
for comment. But he’s suing OU for
defamation. And he and his attorney have
been quoted in other publications as saying
that, while the accused students are guilty
of sloppy citation practices, their crime
is not plagiarism. Gunasekera and his
defenders stress that all of the offenses
occurred in the literature review sections
of the papers, where there’s not
much original thought and where much of
the language covers a lot of the same
ground. Moreover, they note, none of the
students is accused of plagiarizing or
falsifying research results, which they
say would be a more serious violation.
Those arguments, however, fail to resonate
with many engineering academics and ethics
experts. David Munson, University of Michigan’s
dean of engineering, says that while definitions
of plagiarism can vary, “I wouldn’t
want my master’s students to copy
verbatim any part of another thesis and
not provide a citation.” Barbara
A. Masi, director of education and innovation
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s
School of Engineering, says no part of
an academic paper should be held to a
less-than-stringent standard. “The
fact that you can download an amazing
amount of material is not a reason not
to put it in citations.”
Masi
also disagrees that literature review
sections are mainly “boilerplate.”
Timothy M. Dodd makes a similar point.
Dodd, who is the executive director at
the Center for Academic Integrity (CAI)
at Duke University, says a literature
review is “not just a bibliography,”
because it should highlight the author’s
analytical abilities by showing which
previous tracts the author deems critical.
“We’re treading some shaky
ground trying to parse a definition of
plagiarism.” Certainly Ohio’s
Irwin has no doubts that the suspect papers
constitute plagiarism. “There is
no elementary-school definition of plagiarism,”
Irwin contends. “This is not nit-picking,
either. Honesty, integrity and quality
can’t be halfway.”
The other defense mounted by Gunasekera
and those sympathetic to his plight is
that if a student is guilty of plagiarism,
then he or she should be punished—not
the faculty adviser, because trying to
verify all the material in a literature
review would be too onerous a task. Gunasekera
told the Chronicle of Higher Education:
“There’s a vast amount of
literature out there. It’s hard
for me to know what’s taken from
where. It’s not that easy to find
plagiarism.”
Flimsy Oversight?
That’s not an argument that impresses
many other scholars, either, although
they stress that judgments should be meted
out on a case-by-case basis. If, for instance,
it’s a single instance involving
one professor and one student, then that’s
a pardonable sin. Wallace Fowler, a professor
of aerospace engineering at the University
of Texas, Austin, says it’s his
responsibility to look for plagiarism
in all parts of a paper. That said, he
adds: “I’ll check things as
best as I can, but I know some things
could slip by me.” In other words,
no professor is infallible. But as Duke’s
Dodd points out, the problem at OU’s
mechanical engineering department wasn’t
just one paper, one scholar, but rather
many papers over many years, most of them
involving multiple pages of unattributed
copying. “There’s a pattern
here of faculty turning a blind eye”
to a lack of proper citation, Dodd says.
“That takes it out of the realm
of forgiveness and into the realm of culpability.
There was flimsy oversight there over
plug-and-chug theses.”
Irwin says he doesn’t believe the
disciplined advisers collaborated with
the students. But there wasn’t enough
oversight, which requires ongoing dialogue
with and mentoring of students. “It
is unlikely someone could read (the disputed
papers) carefully and not find problems,”
he adds. Irwin, who’s an electrical
engineer, says when he worked with graduate
students he was closely involved with
each document’s development, reading
every draft of every chapter. Fowler says
plagiarism in papers written by foreign
students is often easier to detect because
many of them do struggle with the language.
His suspicions are raised “if something
looks too polished . . . if (a student)
can write that well in the introduction,
why doesn’t he write as well in
the rest of the paper?”
Foreign students are at the crux of OU’s
scandal. And that’s got to be worrisome
for engineering schools, given that students
from overseas are their bread-and-butter.
Last year, 43 percent of master’s
degrees awarded in engineering went to
foreign students. Beyond possible language
difficulties, some foreign students, particularly
those from Asia, come from countries where
definitions of plagiarism are looser than
in the United States.
To be sure, not all researchers are comfortable
saying the problem was imported from overseas.
“I am leery of this kind of cultural
argument, it smacks of paternalism. I’m
rather dubious of that proposition,”
says Jonathan Knight, of the American
Association of University Professors’
Program in Academic Freedom and Tenure.
Indeed, this country has its own problems
with cheating. A study last year by the
CAI found that 40 percent of American
university students admitted to swiping
stuff off the Internet and using it without
attribution. Still, clearly in some Asian
countries, particularly China, plagiarism
is running amok according to numerous
press reports. In fact, a Google search
on the term “China plagiarism”
turns up more than 4 million hits. Another
issue, Dodd says, is the fast-track schedule
many foreign students are on. Many come
to America on government grants and are
under heavy pressure to get their degrees
and return home. “Many are mostly
interested in getting to the finish line
as fast as they can,” he says. And
that makes them susceptible to using shortcuts
they shouldn’t. “This is where
proper oversight comes in,” Dodd
says. The foreign origins of most of the
suspect students were “a contributing
factor,” Irwin says.
Many graduate schools still operate on
the assumption that successful applicants
already know how to write research papers.
One way to address the problem without
singling out foreign students would be
to require all grad students to attend
writing seminars that cover all aspects
of research papers, including proper attribution.
That’s one of the fixes OU has set
in place. Other schools are ahead of the
pack. Duke has a year-long Ethics in Research
seminar that all grad students must take.
And MIT’s grad students are required
to take two writing courses. “It
certainly helped our students, and it’s
good for the institution, too,”
Masi says. Many academics like the idea,
as well. Says UT’s Fowler: “It
would make my job easier if the theses
I have to read were better to start with.”
The lingering unknown: Is the problem
widespread or was OU’s mechanical
engineering department an isolated case?
Masi calls the Ohio situation “unique,”
but others aren’t so sanguine. “I
am sure that you could find instances
of plagiarism in student work—undergraduate
and graduate—at any university if
you looked hard enough,” Fowler
says. But, he adds, more often than not
it’s probably detected and corrected
before it’s published. Irwin suspects
the worst. “Given the circumstances
here, my expectation is it’s fairly
common.” In Ohio’s mechanical
engineering department, he says, the problem
was student misunderstandings and a mentoring
system that broke down. “I don’t
think that factor is in any way unique
to this university.” Which is why
a new debate about plagiarism that results
in better ways to combat it would be a
healthy thing.
Thomas K. Grose is a freelancer for
a number of national publications, including
Time magazine and U.S. News & World
Report.
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