The first one is about the blatant act of plagiarism related to the article in TOI which appeared on Friday. (Page 6 – Bridges to Learning – How Scots left a mark on Madras) One whole paragraph ( 5th para) was plagiarized from an article which appeared in The Hindu a few years ago. It seems even some other parts in the article were lifted from the articles of the revered historian S Muthiah which had appeared in The Hindu.
The second event is when the first-year student of mine messaged me a verbal analysis question involving one Mr Gopi and his mother. The student got the question from an entrance exam question of a prominent Central University in South India. Since I am not an expert in these type of questions, I did a quick search in Google and to my astonishment found that question was ‘inspired’ by a question which appeared in a foreign university. The question had Mr Horton and his mother instead of Mr Gopi and his mother. What a convenient way to set question paper.
The third episode is about the way students’ copy and pastes answers from the Internet during the online classes. They are can very well brainstorm and find the answers from within. I was teaching them the topic ‘Giving and following instructions’ and had asked them to write some sample instructions. The result was some sophisticated answers copied from Google which were far removed from the topic.
The fourth episode is now forgotten by many. An Assistant Professor ( Shift 1 or Aided stream) in a well-known college in Kerala was caught for publishing a poem written by someone else in her name. The poem was published in a magazine. This initiated a UGC level inquiry and the College Principal was issued a legal notice.
The fifth and final event involves a UK based Malayali writer Karoor Soman and his life mission of publishing 100 books. He wanted to be part of the Guinness Book of World Records. He published a book ( published by Mathroobhoomi Books) which had passages lifted from the travel blogs of the popular blogger Manoj Ravindran.
Why did these people commit plagiarism?
1. The desire to act like God– Omniscient and Omnipotent
2. Work pressure, time and deadline in the case of the journalist
3. The desire to be famous or infamous.
4. Low ethics and no moral compass
5. Plagiarising is quite a normal activity for them. There is no feeling of guilt and they are not aware of the pain of the original creators.
There was a time when I used to share the e-paper of The Hindu with my students and even in RR. PJ who is part of The Hindu web team, strictly warned me not to share a part or whole of the newspaper via Whatsapp or any other medium. So. I started this project for my students where I give them a short preview of the news items. There was a time when I used to share chapters from audiobooks here, copy book summaries from Blinkist app here in RR. Now, the very thought give me shudders.
There is the need to have a ‘collective will’ ( to borrow a phrase from the excellent Netflix documentary - The Social Dilemma) to remove plagiarism from the academic world and our little world.
No comments:
Post a Comment