Examination of Witnesses (Questions 280
- 288)
MONDAY 30 MARCH 2009
PROFESSOR MARGARET
PRICE, DR
CHRIS RUST,
PROFESSOR ROGER
GOODMAN AND
PROFESSOR ALAN
RYAN
Q280 Dr Harris: Can we be certain
that we know how much there is when we are not picking much up,
because I am not sure we are picking that much up.
Professor Price: The processes
of investigating these are still developing.
Q281 Chairman: Dr Rust.
Dr Rust: On the one hand at one
stage you used the word endemic and then we are saying we are
not picking much up; if we are not picking much up, maybe it is
not endemic and maybe it is not the problem that some of the newspaper
headlines suggest.
Q282 Dr Harris: I used the word endemic
in a question, is there evidence to support the assertion?
Dr Rust: I appreciate that. I
think some of the reactions have gone over the top, that it is
an academic plague and those sorts of headline. It is yet another
thing where it is the standard academic answer, more research
needed.
Q283 Dr Harris: More research grants.
Dr Rust: Yes, just give us the
grant and we will do it. This has come about for a variety of
reasons and clearly one of them has been technology. There was
a concern that the internet made it much easier to cut and paste,
but of course technology has also made it easier to identify plagiarism,
so in fact it may be that we are just identifying more easily
and in fact there is no more plagiarism now than there was in
the past, it may just be easier to detect. The crucial answer
is exactly what Margaret said, that there is not one kneejerk
answer, you need a holistic answer to this and that is training
the students so they know about academic integrity, having detection
mechanisms and reasonable penalties that are known across the
institution—standard penalties which will be imposed if
necessary—but also course design that designs out as much
as one can the possibilities of plagiarism in the assessment tasks
being set. A 15-minute viva is very difficult to plagiarise.
Mr Boswell: And resource-intensive.
Q284 Ian Stewart: Luckily for me
as a registered PhD student I was supposed to ask you how it happens—I
mangle the English language so much my supervisors would know
immediately. You answered the question that I was supposed to
ask you, how do you deal with it, but in a strange sense how it
should be dealt with you have just explained, but is that the
way you actually deal with it currently?
Dr Rust: I am not going to claim
that Brookes is perfect but we have got a bit of a reputation
in this area. One of our colleagues is currently seconded in Sweden—she
is internationally known in this area—and we have had a
cross-university system developing academic conduct officers and
so on. We are trying to apply what I said; we are working towards
that.
Q285 Ian Stewart: Is there any cohesion
in trying to apply these principles to stop this across institutions
and who is checking that?
Dr Rust: Across our institution
we have in place what are called academic conduct officers in
every school. That is part of getting a common tariff so that
you have a common institutional treatment rather than different
tutors treating similar cases differently. We have put money into
the Turnitin software and currently there is training going on
across the whole institution for that; so, yes, we have taken
an institutional approach. Clearly the most difficult is the staff
development around designing it out in your assessment tasks.
Q286 Mr Boswell: Is there a network
across different institutions too so that there is a counterpart
who will tip you off if something is going on, who will say "Have
you noticed this piece on the internet that seems to have got
rather popular?"
Dr Rust: I believe there is something
at JISC, the joint information group.
Q287 Chairman: Can I just ask, Professor
Ryan and Professor Goodman, your views on plagiarism before I
bring this to an end?
Professor Ryan: Because we still
stick to the old-fashioned, three-hour, unseen exam there is just
a lot less scope for it getting into the assessment system. There
is plenty of scope for it getting into the tutorial system and
it is not uncommon for the occasional miscreants to be told that
it is better if they read a lousy essay of their own than a rather
good one done by their girlfriend which she happened to have read
the previous week. There are interesting difficulties in that
of course some people do not really have an idea of what is and
what is not plagiarism for a start; some people think that what
it is all about is cut and paste. They have had A-level teachers
who have told them to use this word, this word and this word so
they find a nicely crafted essay and they put it in on the grounds
that it has got the words in that they have been told to use.
There is a very large culture, but the fact that Brookes has as
it were academic conduct officers pushing the idea that if this
is your work and it is your degree then it had better be yours—that
you just need to keep pushing.
Professor Goodman: One of the
curious features is the fact that we do, as Alan said, find the
occasional first year undergraduate is plagiarising their tutorial,
which is not examined, it is not part of the degree per se, suggests
that it is a lack of comprehension about how you do use sources
properly. There is a need to educate them and, clearly, the follow-through
from the school system has not really worked properly there, we
need to spend time at the school end explaining to them how you
use sources and how you put your project work together as well.
Q288 Ian Stewart: In a higher degree
how do you plagiarise in a literature review as distinct from
plagiarising in fieldwork?
Professor Ryan: The really horrid
cases actually tend to be people handing in somebody else's PhD
and I have had a colleague who said he was sorely tempted to say
to a candidate "Why did you change the title of chapter 3?"
Chairman: On that note we will leave
that hanging in the air. Why did we change chapter 3 could be
the title of our report. Can I thank very much indeed Professor
Margaret Price, Dr Chris Rust, Professor Roger Goodman and Professor
Alan Ryan; thank you very much indeed. We will reconvene in ten
minutes.
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