Yesterday, when I wrote about studying here is like a walk in the park, there is one thing I forgot to mention.
Plagiarism.
While it is acceptable and often required to write exactly what is in the text books in India, Plagiarism is a big offence here. Before starting the course, every student is required to attend mandatory lesson about plagiarism and the libraries conducts regular classes about how to reference your work properly.
Few weeks ago, another one of my (Indian)classmate has been hauled up to meet the academic integrity officers for plagiarism. If the integrity officers find the offence a serious misconduct, he will be asked to leave the program/University.
Plagiarism rules are very simple. If you copy something word for word from another source, cite it. If you copy the content/ideas reference it. Uni also provides access to turinitin, a program that checks your work for plagiarism
I understand some of the Indian students find it difficult to write in English, yet you find Chinese students who learned English as a second language and struggling to use google translate from Mandarin to English and spending hours at the library trying to write 800 words essays and they do it without plagiarising.
I think it is the attitude of the Indian students about plagiarism (I am smart, my work is better because it is straight from the text book) that is causing all the trouble. Perhaps it is time Unis in India took active role in stopping plagiarism, a daunting task when some of the Vice chancellors themselves have been accused of plagiarising their entire research topic.
so true! Did not know about citing work even in my masters!
My daughter was doing right from elementary school. In middle school they were formally taught how to cite and had to use it. It became mandatory with points being taken off in High school.
MS: A lot of Indian students still don’t know to cite ref properly..I seriously think Indian institutions really have to start teaching students to cite work properly.
It has to do with culture. Here, professors have a philosophy, that when you are studying masters, you are doing it to learn something, not to get some grade and eventually a degree. You will do your course work YOURSELF and not just copy or paraphrase. During my degree, I used to see most desi students stick together in a corner of library/lab, copying program code and papers etc. They change or paraphrase and submit the same work. I think people are still stuck in getting a degree mode, not that getting degree also has something to do with degree.
Joan: true 🙂