Turkish testing official embroiled in new academic scandal

A top educational official already embroiled in a controversy over an alleged cheating scandal on a national exam has been accused of academic plagiarism.

According to the new claims, Professor Ali Demir, the chairman of Turkey’s Student Selection and Placement Center, or ÖSYM, plagiarized in an article he wrote while working as a lecturer at Loughborough University in 1990. He was reportedly saved from being fired through the intervention of influential scholars at the university.

Demir worked at Loughborough University as a lecturer after completing his doctoral degree at the school. During this period, he penned a nine-part series of articles for a Turkish magazine called “Teknik ve Tekstil” (Technology and Textile). The series appeared to be entirely the work of Demir, but the new allegations say it was instead nearly a word-for-word translation of work by a German writer named Peter Latzke.

Latzke was only mentioned by Demir in a brief acknowledgement in the first part of the series.

The claim of plagiarism was first made by Professor Mike Denton of Leeds University, who brought his allegations to the attention of the Loughborough University administration. They were communicated to Professor Gordon Wray, the head of the school’s textile department, who immediately proceeded to launch an investigation into the matter.

Following a long series of discussions and meetings, Wray accepted as a compromise a written apology from Demir, to be published in the magazine.

“Associate Professor Demir has just obtained written permission for this work from [European textile journal] Melliand Textilberichte. Associate Professor Demir apologizes to both Mr. P.M. Latzke as well as to Melliand Textilberichte for not having obtained written permission prior to the publishing of the series,” said the explanation at the beginning of the ninth and last part in the series.

Demir has recently come into the spotlight in Turkey for his alleged role in a cheating scandal that has erupted around the university entrance exam that took place March 27. ISTANBUL - Radikal

Koch-Mehrin plagiarism charges thicken

Silvana Koch-Mehrin, a leading light of Germany's Free Democratic Party and vice president of the European Parliament, has been accused of widely plagiarising her doctoral dissertation.

A preliminary report released by the internet platform Vroniplag Wiki says 56 of the 201 pages of the MEP’s dissertation contained provable incidents of plagiarism.

Koch-Mehrin got her doctorate for a dissertation entitled, ‘Historic Currency Union between Economy and Politics’ at Heidelberg University. Dons there have already started an academic investigation after allegations were first made against Koch-Mehrin.

Although this investigation could take weeks, the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that it could still be finished by the FDP's party convention in the middle of May.

It said that should that investigation conclude she stole a significant amount of her dissertation it would not only be a major setback for the 40-year-old’s considerable political ambitions. It would also be a body blow for her party which despite having ditched its unpopular leader Guido Westerwelle for Health Minister Philipp Rösler, still languishes below the five percent mark in many opinion polls.

The Vroniplag Wiki report said that not only did 56 of the 201 pages include plagiarism, but that the sources were, “noticeably often articles from textbooks dealing with economic theory and economic and social history.”

It said that in at least four places, her work included more than three-quarters of a page of plagiarised text.

The report concluded that sources were used to a considerable degree but were not well-enough sourced as quotes. “This presents a blatant break with academic standards,” the report said.

Perhaps even more damaging, the report said that, “The frequent changes to the plagiarised texts as well as the fact that these were to be found all through the entire dissertation, leads to the conclusion that the taking of text was not a mistake but was done knowingly.”

The site then raises the question of whether the dissertation was a misuse of tax money as it was funded by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, with money from the Federal Ministry for Education, Science, Research and Technology.

The former Defence Minister Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg of the Christian Social Union was forced to resign at the start of March after his doctoral dissertation was found to have been widely plagiarised. In comparison to his, that of Koch-Mehrin was not as bad, according to a member of the Vroniplag Wiki platform involved in the investigation.

“If you compare this with the Tour de France, then we could say that we have caught Koch-Mehrin doping, while Guttenberg rode off on a motorbike,” a spokesman told the Frankfurter Rundschau daily. “But you get banned for doping too,” he added.

Koch-Mehrin has not yet commented on the allegations. The Local/hc

Keeping science fair

Alex Holcombe

Blind justice. A beautiful ideal! That the merits of a case are to be decided without regard to the identities of the parties involved or the size of their bank accounts.

This is something science aspires to in evaluating manuscripts for publication. In fact it’s fundamental to the integrity of science- when you read an article in a scientific journal, the idea is that you should know that the article went through the same review process as all the others.

The science you see in a prestigious journal is not there because the authors paid more than others did, but rather because the science was evaluated as high quality on its own merits. There are flaws in the process, such as the bias that occurs because usually the reviewers know who the manuscript authors are, but at least there’s no real money involved- nothing as meretricious as some cash to grease the wheels.

But now money has started to infiltrate the system. Several journals are now accepting money for “fast-track” services. It is hard to see how this policy can be implemented without sometimes giving the monied authors an advantage over those who don’t pay. Fast-tracking seems likely to leads to shortcut by the editor or reviewers as they seek to meet the fast-tracking deadline. And it seems these journals won’t even indicate which manuscripts benefited from fast-tracking and which didn’t.

Please join us in signing an open protest letter that we’ll soon send to these journals.

Plagiarism: Can It Be Stopped?

G. Jay Christensen, 
Business Communication Quarterly, published online 13 April 2011

PLAGIARISM CAN BE CONTROLLED, not stopped. The more appropriate question to ask is: What can be done to encourage students to “cheat” correctly by doing the assignment the way it was intended? I have lived my professional teaching life with the philosophy that if students are given a chance to cheat, they may accept that opportunity. Cheating by college students continues to reach epidemic proportions on selected campuses, as witnessed by the recent episode at Central Florida University, where more than 200 seniors cheated on a midterm  examination. I applaud the professor who, in his strategy management class, harangued the students about their need to come forward and admit their cheating. Plagiarism is only one form of cheating and is usually defined as using someone else’s words or ideas as your own without giving credit to the original. >>>