Academic Dishonesty and Graduate Students

CEW Brownbag Discussion

• Research on academic dishonesty among graduate students is comparatively limited. Most studies of academic dishonesty in higher education have tended to focus on undergraduates or on students as a whole, without distinguishing between graduate and undergraduate students. As a result, much of the available information on graduate-level academic integrity issues is anecdotal.

Incidences of Academic Dishonesty By Graduate Students:

• McCabe, Butterfield, and Trevino (2006) found that 56% of MBA students surveyed self-reported having cheated in the previous year, while 47% of non-MBA graduate students reported the same.
On the blog resource “commit-education.blogspot.com,” graduate student admissions of cheating are broken down by discipline as follows: 54% of engineering students, 48% of education students, and 45% of law students surveyed reported having committed academic dishonesty.

• In August of 2007, a massive plagiarism scandal broke in the physical sciences disciplines, in which two graduate students at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, were discovered to have plagiarized a number of their publications:
“…two of the authors of this paper were graduate students with a prodigious track record of publication: over 40 papers in a 22-month span. Dr. Karasu, who sat on the panel that evaluated their oral exams, became suspicious when their knowledge of physics didn't appear to be consistent with this level of output. … ‘All they had done was literally take big chunks of others' work using the “copy and paste” technique,’ Dr. Sarioglu said.” (From Arstechnica.com, August 7, 2007)

The case is worse than it seems, however; there were a number of coauthors involved in each of the papers, all of whom (at least 20 people) are now implicated in this scandal.....

A Case of Plagiarism in the Physics Preprint Server arXiv.

Alex Bienkowski

One of the more interesting developments in web-based scientific publishing has been the growth of arXiv, a “preprint” server originally launched by Paul Ginsparg at Los Alamos and now hosted at Cornell. The system was first called xxx, and the domain was high-energy physics. Later on, the subject focus was broadened to include most of the rest of physics, math, statistics and quantitative biology. Physicists post their drafts on arXiv to have the community review them and suggest improvements. There was some fear at first that physics journals were headed for the bone yard, but that does not seem to have happened, since many authors go on to work up their preprints for publication in the accustomed style. arXiv has become a very interesting and important example of how internet publication can work, since physicists worldwide use it constantly. Maybe some of them use it a little too much, since Nature reported an outbreak of plagiarism based in four Turkish universities. A couple of degree candidates had some impressive publication lists, in a rather outre area of Relativity theory, but they seemed to be having some trouble with Newtonian mechanics. Somebody smelled a rat, and did some digging on arXiv. It turns out that there had been quite a bit of “creative recycling”from one author to another. There was an investigation and in all some 70 publications by 15 authors were removed from the system>>>

Nearly there!

Chris Leonard

Plagiarism & PMC Physics A
There has been a lot of recent publicity on the Turkish plagiarism sandal which has affected arXiv and several high-profile physics journals recently. This has been an 'elephant in the room' of science publishing for some years now. Skillfully manipulated sections of manuscripts from several sources are perhaps amongst the hardest examples of plagiarism to detect, but it is not unknown for complete papers to be submitted with just the authors and affilliations changed (as I had during my time at Elsevier).>>>