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EDUCATION: Fighting Computer-Assisted Plagiarism in Latin America
By Gustavo González*
SANTIAGO, Oct 20 (IPS) - Student plagiarism is becoming more and more common
in Latin America, with the infinite possibilities offered by the Internet to
those who follow the law of least effort.
This is despite stepped-up measures to crack down on the growing phenomenon,
which has become increasingly difficult to detect.
"Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, as
he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that
distant afternoon when Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams to
find himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous bug."
This humorous hodgepodge, which Argentine comic Jorge Maronna and writer
Luis María Pescetti put together in 2000 in their novel "Copyright" using
the first words from the most famous works by Miguel de Cervantes, Gabriel
García Márquez and Franz Kafka, is a good illustration of the "copy-paste"
technique, which has become easy to use thanks to the Internet.
Gabriela Carrasco, who is in her last year of studies at the University of
Chile School of Journalism, served as a teaching assistant in a course taken
by 67 students from different departments, and in each of the four term
papers assigned, she discovered four cases of plagiarism on average.
"The copy-paste technique is more common than the use of complete
documents," Carrasco told IPS. "Students select, copy and paste parts of
different documents to put together a new paper, but generally without
changing a single comma in the original. But some are more experienced and
know how to modify the originals in such a way as to make detection very
difficult."
The School of Journalism announced that students caught plagiarising would
automatically fail the course, while repeat offenders would face the risk of
being expelled from their department.
José López Tarrés, director of undergraduate studies in the Catholic
University of Chile, explained to IPS that in his college, students caught
plagiarising are punished according to the gravity of the case.
For example, a student found copying a small part of a manuscript could
merely receive a verbal warning. But if a larger proportion of the document
was lifted, the culprit could be given a grade of "1", the equivalent of an
"F", "which has a major academic impact." The strongest penalty, for
plagiarism of a thesis for instance, is expulsion.
Educational authorities in Venezuela and Brazil also crack down hard on
plagiarism.
Max Romer, director of the School of Social Communication at the Andrés
Bello Catholic University in Venezuela, told IPS that students caught
plagiarising are often temporarily suspended.
And in a case in which five students were discovered plagiarising as a
group, the incident appears on their record, which means they will never be
able to serve as student representatives or pursue a career in academia,
said Romer.
Julia Blumenschein, a 24-year-old Brazilian with a degree in communication
from the Catholic University of Sao Paulo, remarked to IPS that at her alma
mater, "the punishment is an "F", or in some cases the professor threatens
to impose a collective penalty, like annulling the results of an exam or
papers handed in by the whole class, thus generating pressure among the
students themselves to prevent plagiarising."
While Romer prefers to describe the practice as a "methodological" problem
committed by students who improperly quote from other people's work, Tarrés
refers to it as a serious form of cheating or fraud. "The means used today
to plagiarise - the Internet, instead of books - do not change the ethical
aspects of the question," he said.
In Carrasco's view, cases in which a source is not properly cited, out of
ignorance, generally involve texts mentioned in class notes or recommended
by the professor. "But in general, people copy knowingly, especially if
we're talking about plagiarism of something found on the Internet. And the
truth is that some students are real experts at it."
To plagiarise is to use another person's thoughts, ideas or writings as
one's own, without acknowledging the source. The main victims are academics
and the educational system as a whole, but the unethical practice can also
return to haunt the perpetrators later in their professional lives.
The practice can be found at all levels of education, from secondary school
to the university, and even in postgraduate studies. There are also web
sites, well-known among students, that provide assistance, like "El rincón
del vago" (roughly, "the lazy student's corner") "Monografías" and "Tabula"
(in Spanish) or "Historianet" (in Portuguese). In addition, papers are
bought and sold on-line.
Interviewed by the Brazilian magazine Época in 2000, Waldo Luis Viana said
he charged the equivalent of 450 dollars for a 50-page term paper and twice
that for a master's thesis. And in Brazil, web sites that facilitate
plagiarism receive more visits than the National Library, which offers 8.5
million publications.
The free web sites that lend themselves to plagiarism are built up "in
solidarity" by writers who send their papers to help people surfing the web.
"But those who copy and paste information from these sites are irresponsible
or easily deceived, because no one provides any assurance that the content
is accurate," said Carrasco.
At the National University of Luján, in Argentina, a group of computer
science experts published a paper on "detection of plagiarism in the
educational setting", based on research carried out in Latin America. The
report discusses the magnitude of the problem and the difficulties in
combating it.
Based on their research, the group began to work on creating a specific
software programme for detecting plagiarism. But "the project was put on
hold last year, due to a lack of funds, and because other priorities came
up," Fernando Bordignon, one of the team members, told IPS.
"Plagiarism hunters," however, can use Internet search engines like Google
to track down the original documents, based on specific phrases that have
raised suspicion.
The system "is tedious, but not complicated," said Carrasco. In her
experience, it is necessary to search not only for the first words of a
paper, but for several different paragraphs.
"Some people, however, make a much greater effort, changing the way the
original was written while preserving the ideas, and that is impossible to
detect because they also often use fragments from different places," she
added.
In fighting plagiarism, teachers and professors also fall back on their
experience. "My mother, who is a professor of linguistics at the Catholic
University of Sao Paulo, said she can tell when someone has committed
plagiarism, just by reading their work," said Blumenschein.
"Sometimes you can tell just by looking at the graphic aspects of the
paper," said Lorena Pino, a professor of television at the School of Social
Communication of the public University of Caracas in Venezuela.
But she also admitted to IPS that when papers downloaded from the Internet
are written in straightforward, simple language, they are more likely to
pass off as the student's own work.
Lucía Guerra, a teaching methodology professor in the History Department at
the University of Santiago in Chile, told IPS that the use of plagiarism
also depends on what kind of assignments professors hand out, and whether or
not they ask their students to interpret, rather than simply gather,
information.
Maurizio Liberatoscioli, a professor of filmmaking with the School of Arts
at Venezuela's Central University, made a similar observation: "If students
copy and paste comments on a film from a web site, it is not only dishonest,
but it also does not fit the assignment, because I ask for analyses of films
using tools I provide in class."
Academic sanctions, oversight and computer searches, efforts to promote
ethics, the teaching of techniques for quoting properly, and creative
teaching methods are the weapons available in the fight to curb plagiarism,
since total eradication of the phenomenon would seem to be a utopia.
* With additional reporting by Marcela Valente in Argentina, Mario Osava in
Brazil and Humberto Márquez in Venezuela.
(END/2005)
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