Development & Aid, Education, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean, Population

EDUCATION: Fighting Computer-Assisted Plagiarism in Latin America

Gustavo González*

SANTIAGO, Oct 20 2005 (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.