Plagiarism, UGC & Higher Education

Last week it was reported in the media that the University Grants Commission (UGC) had approved the regulations drafted in September 2017 titled “Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism in Higher Education Institutions” in its meeting held on March 20. This is a laudable step and the academia welcomes it. The regulations clearly spell out the extent, numerically, which is permissible in the similarity between textual matter and numbers while comparing submissions made by students, faculty, researchers and others associated with institutions of higher education. Stringent punishments have been provided which may result in students losing their registration and the faculty their jobs if they are found guilty of copying without giving due credit to the original source.

In higher education plagiarism has been a major issue of academic dishonesty and in no way can be only related to India. This is a global phenomenon, however, India is perceived as a lenient country whereas most of the well-known universities abroad take tough measures to curb it and thereby send the right signal to the student and faculty body that plagiarism in any form would not be tolerated. Plagiarism is both a legal and an ethical matter and therefore creating a proper deterrence is not restricted only to legal action; peer pressure and intellectual ostracisation are often more effective and meaningful. To a large extent, legal action may be restricted to infringement of the provisions of the copyright law, which is a larger context include ethical aspects also known as moral copyright.

With the help of technology, it has become a bit easier to, at least, identify identical passages, loosely paraphrased passages, etc. However, a number of softwares used for this purpose have the limitation of picking up such copied passages only. The thought process can itself be copied and detecting it and thereafter taking remedial action still depends on human intervention. The increasing use of artificial intelligence and machine language, in all likelihood, will make the detection of the train of thoughts possible with the help of software. The problem, however, lies in the basic understanding of copyright, which is very well developed and practised on the ‘idea-expression dichotomy’. According to the copyright law, there is no legal protection for ideas, only expressions can be protected. Thus the same ideas can be expressed by different authors in different forms without any problem under the copyright law, however, the ethical test will be more stringent as the idea itself is to be attributed to the person who first thought about it and shared it with others, preferably in a tangible form.

The academic thought process can often be quite similar – and in so many instances even identical – as far as the students are concerned. Intentional plagiarism is sure to be penalised but unintentional and inadvertent plagiarism need not be punished as the level of awareness and exposure to issues related to copyright and plagiarism is unquestionably quite low. The students must be made aware of the broad aspects of plagiarism as the rules of the game suddenly change when they move from schools to colleges without any proper orientation to the practical aspects – the dos and don’ts – of plagiarism. With a lot of material available at the click of a mouse, thanks to the Internet, there is often temptation to simply copy and paste a big chunk of material freely available at different websites into project reports, presentations, assignments, etc.

Plagiarism is a big menace and it is often jokingly said that if a person copies from one source it is plagiarism, but if he copies from multiple sources it becomes research. Tom Lehrer, who studied and later lectured at Harvard, used to sing, and tongue in cheek wrote the lyrics and sang the song ‘Lobachevsky’, which includes the following:

“Plagiarize!
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes
So don’t shade your eyes
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize
Only be sure always to call it please “research”

The UGC is not going to take it lightly. If researchers still wish to follow Lehrer, they can do that at their own peril.

The author is a professor at IIM-A,
akagarwal@iima.ac.in