Plagiarism Allegations

[Andrew0409]

Why is this nerd getting 2 masters anyways?

[jimipresley]

@Andrew0409

Am I the only one who thinks who cares. Like why do I give a shit about a thesis from years ago?

So I can copy a paper from someone else, and as long as I acknowledge them , I’ll get my PHD? I like this.

[Andrew0409]

@jimipresley

So I can copy a paper from someone else, and as long as I acknowledge them , I’ll get my PHD? I like this

I don’t really care. This is assuming you are able to defend it and do all the work up to the point. It’s not like you just turn in a thesis and that’s it.

[loser]

I knew a Chinese guy with very wealthy parents, never studied. He got a sky high toefl.

He said he took exam in California. He received pencils with all the answers from morning exam in Boston and walked into the California exam

[TT]

@izzy

i see it as more of a short cut, and not cheating.

I’m sure a lot of teachers would prefer a shortcut to doing the actual grading as well. How about throwing all the papers down a stairwell, heaviest papers go farthest and get the best grade?

[izzy]

I am not a teacher, so this is just my personal opinion. As for teachers and grading, I think many teachers use short cuts as well, for example re-using the same test questions year after year.
From your answer I understand you are a dedicated teacher, who takes his work to heart. I do not condone any cheating or laziness, be it the teacher or the student, but I have no problems with some short cuts.

[Charlie_Jack]

I can’t help but wonder why these kinds things weren’t caught by the committee in question, or at least by the graduate college or its equivalent. Oh, well.

Anyway, I must say that I can’t help but be impressed by the readers of such works. Specifically, I’m impressed by the level of devotion and intellectual curiosity which motivates these readers to labor over such dry, specialized works as these, as well as by the readers’ astuteness–their perspicacity in detecting suspicious-looking strings of text–and most of all, by their diligence in finding the uncredited sources. Kudos to these talented, selfless souls, kudos!

[Marco]

@DrewC

@Marco

I’d expect it is better today.

It’s not much tbh.

I’ll take your word for it. You have more experience in education than I do.

[afterspivak]

Cheating like this is almost certainly getting harder in a digital age, when there are now platforms through which to run prospective theses to ensure they are in fact original work. I have no experience using those platforms, and I have no idea if they will give “false positives” or “false negatives.” But viewed broadly, it looks like we are heading into a different era now.

Guy

[DrewC]

@Marco

I’ll take your word for it. You have more experience in education than I do.

Well, I wasn’t teaching 30-40 years ago. If it’s much better now than it must have been REALLY bad before. I teach a couple hundred students every semester, and I’d say about ten plagiarize some or all of their final works at the end of every semester (and those are just the ones I catch… I’m sure some slip through the net).

[Charlie_Jack]

@afterspivak

. . . there are now platforms through which to run prospective theses to ensure they are in fact original work.

I think I’ve seen ads (or free-trial offers?) for something like that, and I think that some years ago I briefly used (or dabbled with) a free version of something like that.

[hansioux]

The master thesis in question was from Mayor Lin’s second masters at NTU, not his first masters at Chunghua university. He basically provided the data he collected during his first mayoral campaign to his lab, and that got turned into several papers with different goals and analysis.

So far it seems like the parts that are shared between the two theses are the parts laying out the data. I think it’s more likely both are just quoting the original internal report on the stats collected by Lin’s team.

[Charlie_Jack]

@hansioux

The master thesis in question was from Mayor Lin’s second master at NTU, not hist first masters at Chunghua university. He basically provided the data he collected during his first mayoral campaign to his lab, and that got turned into several papers with different goals and analysis.

So far it seems like the parts that are shared between the two theses are the parts laying out the data. I think it’s more likely both are just quoting the original internal report on the stats collected by Lin’s team.

For the record, my post was ironic. As a general matter, I’m not fond of this “plagiarism! gotcha!” game.

I’ve never been on a committee (you know, the kind of academic committee that examines these kinds of things before approving or disapproving them), but if I ever were on a committee and I saw something like what’s being discussed in this thread (I’m not addressing whether the report(s) is (are) accurate), I guess I’d say something like this to the candidate:

Some of this stuff is verbatim, or just about. You need to paraphrase, really paraphrase. And you need to cite everything that belongs to somebody else, using one of the style manuals. (Some departments require a specific style manual.) If the department doesn’t require a particular style manual, I guess you can choose one according to your preferences. Whichever manual and citation method you use, you should do it just the way the manual says to do it.

You can use other people’s ideas, but you have to cite them. And if you use their exact words, you have to quote them. I know this all sounds like a pain, but you have to do it that way. If it gives you trouble, look around campus, and there’s probably someone who can help you with it.

And as far as I can tell, that’s one possible way to keep at bay the particular–uh–entities that came after Mr. Lin. But I noted what you said, and I take your word for it, so I’m not accusing Mr. Lin of plagiarism.

[hansioux]

I agree with everything you’ve said. I’m also amazed that 1. there are departments in the NTU where thesis doesn’t need to be written in English, 2. there are departments in the NTU where thesis doesn’t need to go through a program to check for such things.

[Charlie_Jack]

@hansioux

2. there are departments in the NTU where thesis doesn’t need to go through a program to check for such things.

'Way back when I was hiding out in grad school in the US, the Dean of the Graduate College used to give some of us English Department layabouts (well, actually I was probably the only layabout in the bunch) a little something to do at the end of the semester. He’d hire a few of us and give us the title of “Proofreading Assistant.” He had his own method of recording errors (not much like the classic proofreading marks), and I think he supplied us with special sheets for that method.

Eventually, everybody got their MA but me (I finally did get mine, later on), so I was the only one left to do the job. The Dean always used to say, “Just make it look professional.” We weren’t a prestigious school. He just didn’t want the university to shame itself, and especially not the grad school.

Anyway, around that time, an old friend of mine and I were having a long-distance telephone conversation. Unlike me, he’d been a good student for as long as we’d known each other. In consequence he had a PhD from a good school, and he went on to have a good career.

When I told him what I’d been doing at the end of each semester (that’s right, I was there for too many semesters), he said, “I thought the committees usually took care of that.”

Then I realized that the Dean of the Graduate College of my little local university had just been basically cleaning up after the various academic committees/departments.

So it’s not just NTU.

[Gain]

@DrewC

Plagiarism is a HUGE problem here (and in East Asia in general… I had the same issues when I taught in Korea). They just don’t give it the same weight as they do in the west

Hardly. Thesis plagiarism is rampant in Germany.

German politicians are dogged by claims of Ph.D. plagiarism – DW – 05/25/2021

German politicians suffer higher degree of embarrassment from plagiarism than...

There was a huge scandal in Luxembourg too. Their former PM plagiarised his entire thesis, only 2 pages were original.

Luxembourg PM Xavier Bettel admits allegations of plagiarism

It’s a problem in all countries where politicians are expected to have post-graduate academic credentials, aka East Asia and German-speaking countries.

[DrewC]

Interesting. I didn’t know that. I will read up on it. Maybe it’s a high-pressure society, thing? Germany takes efficiency as seriously as Japan, and is pretty conservative and competitive compared to other western countries.

[afterspivak]

@Gain

East Asia

I wonder how Japan fits here? I’ve never sensed pressure for politicians (or really anyone) in Japan to do postgraduate work. The real key is where they landed for their undergraduate degree—ideally the University of Tokyo with a degree in Law if they want to be PM.

Guy

[hansioux]

Also, if paraphrasing alone would fix the issue, I don’t think it’s really plagiarism. Real plagiarism to me is stealing other people’s ideas, data, and conclusion. Even if every sentence in the papers are different, it could still be plagiarism, the worst kind.

[Charlie_Jack]

@hansioux

Also, if paraphrasing alone would fix the issue, I don’t think it’s really plagiarism. Real plagiarism to me is stealing other people’s ideas, data, and conclusion.

Oh, I agree with that:

@Charlie_Jack

You need to paraphrase, really paraphrase. And you need to cite everything that belongs to somebody else. . . .

You can use other people’s ideas, but you have to cite them. And if you use their exact words, you have to quote them.

(boldface added)

I wasn’t suggesting that it’s okay to just paraphrase. Of course citing is necessary.

There’s also the problem of relying so heavily on others’ ideas that even if one is diligent in citing and quoting, the work comes across as unacceptably unoriginal.

That depends on context, though. Suppose I want to write about E. P. Thompson quitting the Communist Party back in the 1950s. I guess I’m gonna have to write a little bit about who E. P. Thompson was, huh? And I’m gonna have to cite sources. This is factual stuff, so if I try to paraphrase too thoroughly, it’s liable to look pretty weird.

Some years ago, I had to do that here in Taiwan, by the way. I had to come up with “Intermediate” and “Advanced” versions of sentences like, “He opened the door.” Had to. Ordered to. Intermediate version. Advanced version. And I did. But it wasn’t a pretty sight.

More about citing. A few years ago I was goofing around with a blog in which I committed the sin (among other sins) of too many lengthy block quotes of things that I found interesting. But as far as I know, I was good about citing. I think I started off with MLA, and later switched to The Chicago Manual of Style. (I didn’t buy the actual manuals. I scrounged around on the 'net for whatever snippets, chunks or condensations I could find of those two manuals, and I may have been aided a little by memory.) And the great majority of the stuff I was writing about or quoting was from the nineteenth century, so it was extremely unlikely that copyright would be an issue.

Not much in the way of original thinking in that blog. It was mostly, “Look at this. Look at that.”

As far as I know, the only real issues about the blog were that it looked ugly, boring, and mildly crazy.