Burden of PLAGIARISM, The

ASEE Prism, Nov 2006 by Grose, Thomas K

A scandal at Ohio University has raised all sorts of questions, including whether academic advisers should be punished for not detecting the cheating.

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."