By Sheree Russouw
Plagiarism has become so rife within South Africa's universities that lecturers have begun using sophisticated computer software to catch cheats. Universities approached by Saturday Star this week said the Internet was the leading source for material used by con artists on their prestige campuses.
Several students at Pretoria University, the University of Cape Town (UCT) and Stellenbosch University have already failed their courses, been suspended or even been expelled for using unreferenced sources in their work.
Although the problem is seen as "difficult to quantify", last year alone more than 50 episodes of plagiarism were reported to UCT's disciplinary committees.
At the University of Pretoria, a shocking 80 percent of 150 undergraduates interviewed for a study on plagiarism last September admitted that they regularly copied their assignments straight from the Internet.
"Plagiarism has become an increasingly serious problem over the last few years," said Craig MacKenzie, the head of English at the University of Johannesburg.
He said students were Internet-savvy and could do "cut-and-paste" jobs very easily.
"There is no question that the Internet has exacerbated the problem," MacKenzie said.
"I spend most of my time not assessing the merits of the students' work but trying to track down their (unacknowledged) Internet sources.
"We are usually alerted to plagiarism by the elevated register of a student's writing, or the unevenness of style - unusually sophisticated phrasing, Americanisms and the like," he said.
Most of the students interviewed at the Pretoria University attributed their penchant for plagiarism to academic laziness, poor time management and a lack of research skills, said Drienie Naude, a lecturer in educational psychology.
"Students don't know how to balance their social and academic lives.
"A day before they have to submit assignments, they just take the whole thing from the Internet, plonk it in a document and hand it in as their own," she said.
Until now, students had been getting away with plagiarism, said MacKenzie.
"It is becoming more and more difficult to detect as students are becoming very sophisticated in doing a pastiche of various sites and covering their tracks by doing word substitutions electronically - but the net is closing."
Academics are now detecting unoriginal work with software such as TurnItIn, in widespread use at universities in Britain and the United States. These programmes run web searches and comparisons, highlighting and colour-coding suspect sentences, passages, tables and graphs.
MacKenzie said that, in addition, lecturers were setting more of their class tests and assignments on material they knew the Internet had no sources on.
Universities now demand that students formally acknowledge that their submitted work is their own and that students use proper referencing techniques to acknowledge the original authors.
Apart from these checks, written and oral exams as well as external assessments mean students will be unlikely to leave university with qualifications they have not actually earned.
At Stellenbosch University, lecturers say they are on "high alert" when evaluating postgraduate research projects and students are made to defend their findings before experts in the field, according to spokesperson Mohamed Shaikh.
UCT spokesperson Andrea Weiss said the varsity published any cases of plagiarism that came before its disciplinary committees to "remind students of the consequences of dishonesty".
Wits University also threatened to name a "virulent plagiarist in the interests of academic standards", said registrar Derek Swemmer. Disturbingly, many students apparently see nothing wrong with plagiarism.
"Even though students are informed of plagiarism, they seem to be surprised when they are charged as they say that is how it was done at school," said Stellenbosch's Shaikh.
Hennie Lotter, head of philosophy at the University of Johannesburg, said it was up to academics to teach students the value of independent thinking.
"We must make our students aware of the value of intellectual property and the significance of producing creative ideas that result from one's own hard work," said Lotter.
What Is Plagiarism?
The act or an instance of passing off the thoughts, writings, inventions etc. of another person as one's own - Concise Oxford Dictionary
Beating The Cheats
- A final-year student at UCT did not graduate after she was discovered "passing off, as her own, chunks and passages" of others' work in assignments. This included the use of verbatim quotations and paraphrased versions of their writings.
- A student doing her Masters' degree at UCT failed her course when it was discovered that parts of her dissertation were copied word for word from sources without acknowledgment.
- Two years ago the department of journalism at the Tshwane University of Technology expelled a student for plagiarism.