Digenis.org

If you’re a new reader to this site you may not be aware of an ongoing series I started back in 2004, when I was a student at Moscow International University. The series is called ‘Academic Integrity po-russky’ and explores the lax attitude towards plagiarism in Russian academic circles and the controversy that’s come up against initiatives to curb it.

My previous posts told of the wide-scale plagiarism I saw as a student, how one could buy research papers in the Moscow metro, the ingenuity of Russian shpargalki (crib-sheets), and Russian LiveJournal reactions to the accusations that Putin himself was a plagiarizer (gasp!).

I’ll just begin this post with a short humorous quip I heard as I was asking some Russians about this topic:

“Списывание с одного источника - плагиат, с двух - компиляция, с трёх и более - диссертация.”

“Copying from another source is called ‘plagiarism’. Copying from two sources is called ‘a compilation’. Copying from three or more sources is called ‘a dissertation’.

Whether or not you think plagiarism is a big deal, it’s clear that it’s becoming a hotter issue in educational institutions thanks to peer-to-peer networks, where users trade not only pirated music and video, but also documents and research papers. There are also a few websites, for example, 5ballov.ru (5 points, the Russian equivalent of an A+ mark), where Russian students can freely download tens of thousands of term papers on a number of subjects.

Kommersant Newspaper last Thursday ran an article entitled ‘Антиплагиат не пройдет’ (Anti-plagiarism Won’t be Tolerated) about the controversy over a website where Russian instructors can check their students’ papers for instances of plagiarism.

The web application, which resides at Antiplagiat.ru, has in fact been around since 2005. According to the website, the purpose of the initiative is ‘to improve the quality of the Russian education system, specifically in those areas where students are required to write research papers, term reports, and other original compositions’. As of September 21, 2007, the Antiplagiat database contains over 10,600,000 documents with which it compares the papers uploaded and checked by instructors. Since its launch, many institutes, universities, and even the Russian Ministry of Education have given their support to the project.

As it turns out, the site is also frequented by students themselves, no doubt using the service to see if the complex algorithms can indeed detect instances of ‘borrowing’ in their course work. In fact, one of the more active threads at the Antiplagiat Forums is titled ‘How to get around the system’, where many students have voiced their frustrations:

Наша кафедра взяла на вооружение антиплагиат…. млин, я никогда так не мучался с курсовой!!! (Петров Иван Аликович

Our department is now armed with the Antiplagiat system… Dang, I’ve never been so tormented by a term paper!!! (Ivan Alikovich Petrov)

and

Готов заплатить больше, чем Министерство образование (за создание сайта) - только бросьте этот, по-моему, “дурацкий” проект. (Пономарев Алексей Владимирович)

I’m willing to outpay the Ministry of Education (to build a site) - just abandon this stupid project (Aleksei Vladimirovich Ponomarev)

The commentary goes on and on with people’s suggestions on how to ‘fool’ the system and the moderators’ claims that it cannot be fooled. The author of the Kommersant article tracked down a Russian hacker named Georgi who claims to have created a program called ‘Killer’, which can effectively fool the Antiplagiat system.

Here’s a screenshot of the results of feeding a plagiarized paper through Antiplagiat:

The table shows three instances of plagiarism and their original sources.

Whether or not any such services could effectively curb plagiarism is still up for debate; students will either use their creativity to write original papers or they will use it to find ways around the system. Student groups in the United States have been successful in pressuring their universities to cease using such systems under the premise that it’s an infringement of their intellectual property rights for their papers to be added automatically to these databases.

In my opinion, the real test of determining whether such a system could actually work actually rests with the instructors and professors. Do they really have the time or will power to digitize and upload each paper of each of their students, then weeding out false positives? With the relatively low salaries of teachers, I highly doubt that many of them would consider it worth their time. I’d give the Antiplagiat site an ‘A for effort’, but I don’t think it passes the test in practicality.

While we’re on the topic of term papers and plagiarism, let me mention a recent April Fool’s Day joke played by Yandex, the Yahoo of Russia.

On April 1, 2006 Yandex announced on its company news blog that they’re rolling out an exciting new service geared towards “students, designers, journalists, academics, modern writers, and anyone who may have to write a certain length text on a certain topic.” Perhaps they could add future-presidents to that list…The service is called Яндекс Рефераты and it claims to generate unique academic abstracts on a variety of topics.

I captured a screenshot of the site just in case they take it down soon after April:

Simply choose from the list of topics and Yandex ‘generates’ a unique 200-word essay. But what about those pesky accusations of plagiarism?

Нажав на кнопку “Написать реферат” вы лично создаете уникальный текст, причем именно от вашего нажатия на кнопку зависит, какой именно текст получится - таким образом, авторские права на реферат принадлежат только вам..

By pressing the “Write essay” button you’ll create a one of a kind text. Moreover, because the composition entirely depends on the click of your mouse, all rights of authorship belong solely to you.

He heh… Gotta love the reasoning there. Not only is it not plagiarism, but it actually solves the problem of plagiarism:

По замыслу Яндекса новый сервис должен навсегда закрыть проблему поиска рефератов в Сети. Студентам больше не придется списывать чужие тексты, а преподавателям — заниматься доказательством плагиата. Наконец-то и те, и другие смогут вплотную заняться содержанием.

By design, the new Yandex service should once and for all solve the problem of people searching for term papers on the internet. Students no longer need to copy others’ works, and teachers will no more have the difficult task of proving plagiarism. Finally, they and others can earnestly focus on content.

They’ve got a great sense of humor to do this April Fool’s Joke right on the heels of the news that Putin’s dissertation may contain plagiarism.

Списывание с одного источника - плагиат, с двух - компиляция, с трёх и более - диссертация.

I wasn’t going to enter the discussion about the accusations of Putin plagiarizing his PhD thesis seeing as the Accidental Russophile has already blogged it and some great commentary has followed over there. Plus, I like to keep any Putin-related rants on this site to a bare minimum, just for my own sake as a foreigner living in Russia…

However, even though I wrote about my observations on plagiarism in Russia back in 2004, the topic keeps coming up and I’ve decided to enter the fray. But instead of delving into my own feelings on this, I thought it would be a bit more interesting to see what the Russian blogosphere and Рунет had to say about it.

I began over at Technorati, a weblog search engine which claims to keep track of what’s happening on 33.4 million blogs. Though it doesn’t yet have too many Russian-language blogs in its database, I was able to find 82 entries with a “??????? ?????” query.

I was disappointed to find that most people were merely posting links to articles and not offering commentary, but I’ve still managed to skim through many and cull some sound-bites:

LJ user Elephleo:
Моя позиция по данному вопросу следующая: есть в тексте диссера куски чужой книги или нет - не так важно, как то - ссылается диссертант на первоисточник или нет. Если нет - однозначно плагиат, если да…все претензии к ученому совету, пропустившему фуфел горбатый (малоинтересную работу). С другой же стороны, поскольку ученый совет в данном вопросе изрекает истину в последней инстанции, всем прочим остается только принять решение высокоученой коллегии.

My position on this subject is as follows: Whether or not this dissertation contains excerpts from some other book is not as important as whether or not the author cites the original sources. If there’s no citation, it’s simply plagiarism. If there are… then all claims should be directed to the academic council which passed this piece of deranged rubbish (uninteresting paper). On the other hand, seeing as that academic council has failed to make the right decision in the past case, all other decisions should be made by a highly scholarly board.

Also a comment that follows LJ user sdanilov’s post:

Ammosov writes:
Думаю, что списывал, своими словами или нет, не знаю. Но квалифицирующие признаки плагиата - это не только неоргинальность, но и попытка выдать чужие мысли за свои. А тут налицо только неоригинальность, но не отрицание авторства. Вот будь у нас такая дефиниция, было б проще - “четыре слова в ряд не закавычены - виновен”.

I think that he copied (from Gaddy), but I don’t know if he paraphrased it or not. The defining characteristic of plagiarism is not just unoriginality, but also the attempt to pass off another’s thoughts as one’s own. Here we have unoriginality, but no denial of authorship. It would be simpler for us if we accept this definition of plagiarism: “…four consecutive words without quotation marks.”

At Nika Dubrovsky’s LJ, a commenter sees it all as a political and psychological attack on Putin:

salnikov_vova said:
Это просто очерендная акция против Путина. Психологическая война… Поручили несколькоим информагенствам и они теперь тщательно копаются во всех обстоятельствах жизни Путина, придумывая компромат. …Кто слышал, как Путин по три часа общается в эфире с населнием, отвечая на совершенно разные вопросы и разбирая очень разные проблемы, понимает, что президент совершенно адекватен.
Ждите завтра информацию, что Путин антисемит…
This is just the usual anti-Putin cause. It’s psychological warfare…They pass on this info to a few news agencies and now they’ll go digging deep into every aspect of Putin’s life, thinking up compromising material along the way. Anyone who’s heard him speak on the air for 3 hours at a time with the Russian public, answering all different kinds of questions and solving all types of problens, knows that the president is totally competent.

Just wait until tomorrow when they announce that Putin is an anti-semite…

The discussion at LJ user group ru_politics quickly devolved into ethnic insults and vulgarity.

Still, I think the best discussion on this topic has taken place on a few forums, namely Alex Exler’s Forum (8 pages and counting) and the Canada.ru boards.

I suppose what it might come down to is that there seems to be fundamental differences in how Westerners and Russians define and academic plagiarism and to what extent they feel citations are necessary.

Oh, and as this post was all about rounding up people’s views on plagiarism, comments are more welcome than ever.

As a student in Moscow last year, I wrote a bit about academic integrity in Russian universities as it related to the lax discipline on things like plagiarism, cribsheets, and the sale of term papers in the metro stations.

I just came across an article on Ananova about a man who tried to take a Moscow State University journalism exam for his sister, but was caught due to an overestimation of his sister’s voluptuousness:

Foiled by fake boobs
A Russian man who tried to sit university entrance exams for his sister was caught because his breasts were too big.

The young man was not admitted to the entry exam for Moscow State University’s journalism department, reports Interfax.

Yasen Zasursky, dean of the journalism department, said security staff paid particular attention to a girl with bright makeup and “especially outstanding feminine features”.

A thorough check revealed that the girl was in fact a young man trying to pose as a girl to pass the exam for his sister.

The dean said that security were especially suspicious because the applicant’s breasts were of “incomparable proportions”.

They thought that cheat notes could be hidden inside her clothing. However, it turned out that the breasts were fake.

The young man was barred from the entry exam and his sister was also struck off the university entrant list for cheating.

Too funny. I’m trying to track down some Russian sources on this too.

(Read parts one, two and three)

I find it intriguing that ever since I did that short little series on cheating in Russian schools and universities, I’ve been getting quite a few Google hits from the search terms курсовая, реферат, and диплом.

Interesting. Could this be students looking for these types of papers online?

If you ride the Moscow metro’s circle line during the busier times of the day, you’ll notice sooner or later the ladies standing near the magazine racks holding paper signs that say дипломы.

The Russian word диплом sometimes means the same thing as its English cognate (diploma), but it can also refer to the реферат or курсовая работа that a student is required to write in order to graduate from a particular year of schooling. You could think of it as a final paper if you want an English equivalent.

I usually walk right past them, but yesterday, remembering my little blog series, I decided to stop and see what the deal was. Well, in fact, I walked past her at first out of fear that someone I know would see me and actually assume that I was using such services, but then turned back because I was incredibly curious to find out how much something like that costs.

Pulling a tiny notebook out of her purse, the lady recited the spiel that prices varied depending on the topic, length of the paper, and how soon it was needed. I asked her how much a 15 page paper on the Octoberist Revolution would cost, but she just scribbled down a telephone number and the name ‘Vlad’, ripped the page out of the notebook, and told me to negotiate a price with this fellow. I asked her again how much something like that generally costs, but she just told me to call this guy.

As I continued on my way home, I decided not to call Vlad. Having spoken with this woman and seeing that she had several pages of telephone numbers of folks who would write these academic papers, I figured that aside from the price I knew how the system worked.

I’m imagining now what would happen if someone were to stand in the middle of a shopping mall in the US offering to write reports for students. It’s hard for me to picture such a scene, but I suppose they would just be asked to leave.

I’m sure that very few students actually buy their research papers from these folks in the metro (it’s definitely not on the scale of shpargalki or plagiarism), but there must be at least a few who do it if such a ’service’ is offered.

If you have any info, articles, knowledge, or opinions on this, I hope you’ll comment.

UPDATE: A quick internet search produced the following article from Известия:

ДИПЛОМ НА ЗАКАЗ : рынок рефератов и курсовых переживает лучшие времена

At the end of the article, there is a price table which gives the following information:

Referat (15 pages)
on Literature: 450-600 roubles ($28-30)
on Economics:450-650 roubles
on Law:450-600 roubles

Kursovaya (25 pages)
1000-1500 roubles ($34-50)
800-1500 roubles ($28-50)
600-800 roubles ($20-28)

Diplomnaya (70 pages)
$200-250
$250-300
$250-300

These figures are from 2002, so like the price of everything else in Moscow they have probably risen.

The Russian word шпаргалка can mean a few things. Most often, this slang refers to a cheatsheet, crib, or some concealed form of notes that a student uses during an exam. The slang word шпора (spur) is used less, but is basically equivalent to шпаргалка.

I remember during my high school years in the US hearing stories of students writing test answers on their arms, the bill of their hat, or even on their tennis shoe, not to mention the whole ‘one cough means a, two means b, and so on. . .’  method of cheating. Still, I’d have to say that I think Russian students take the cake on this one; they seem much more creative in their cheating.

In February 1998 the Russian newspaper Moskovskij Komsomolyets had an article precisely about this (you can read the original article here, if you like). They surveyed 107 university/institute students, inquiring about their cribsheet practices: if they used shpargalki, what they wrote on, and where they hid them.

The results went something like this:

Out of 107 students, only one denied using shpargalki.

71% - write their cheatsheets on small scraps of paper
11% - write on purchased goods
7% - have a whole notepad of crib for all their subjects
5% - record information onto a tape and listen through a player
7% - some other way

21% - hide their cheatsheets in their pockets
20% - underneath their notebook
11% - behind their belt
8% - under their watch or in their sleeve
7% - in their shoe
7% - write on their hands
6% - hide it in their socks
5% - under their skirt
5% - record onto a tape and listen through player
2% - hide it in their bra
2% - in their ear

If you’re still not convinced that Russian students put more thought and imagination into their cheat sheets, then perhaps you should visit the Museum of Shpargalki in the Russian city of Yarovoe. There you’ll find such wonders as a cheatsheet written on a cigarette and a normal pencil with ten physics equations written on it.

In coming to Russia to study for a year, I expected right from the start to have an academic experience different from anything my American university could offer. I knew that there would be differences in teaching methodology, student-teacher interaction, and all that would be generally expected of me. I got used to some differences right away, but other things still make my jaw drop and my conscience object.

In American universities we have a policy referred to these days as ‘academic integrity’. It’s essentially an honor code between the student and their institution, stating that the student will not cheat on exams or plagiarize in written coursework. At both U.S. universities I have attended, this code has been heavily stressed and the consequences of breaking it (which can range from failure of the course to expulsion from the university depending on a few things) clearly explained. In other words, back home, academic integrity is a big deal.

In Russia things work differently.

But before I go on, I need to make an important distinction. The purpose of this series is not about ragging on about how many Russian students plagiarize or use crib sheets on exams. It’s more about how plagiarism is viewed and accepted here. I’m also not arguing that American students don’t plagiarize or use crib sheets. Of course there are students in every country who do these things. The point is that they are probably fewer and that the consequences are very different when they get caught.

The first experience that I’ll mention is that several other students and I have been told by professors that it’s perfectly fine to plagiarize to some extent in our research papers. The academic advisor that I have for my project is a great instructor, academically-qualified, and I love her to pieces. She’s helped point me in the right direction in finding resources, arranged an interview for me at the Russian Academy of Sciences, and I’m positive that most improvements made in my Russian are related to her help in some way or another. Needless to say, I have a great respect for her.

So, I was surprised when in one of our meetings she commented that she couldn’t understand why Americans are so afraid to copy someone else’s words. “‘If somebody else has said something well, why should you go and paraphrase it?” she asked me, after I had asked for her help in reworking a paragraph long sentence on the 1917-18 language reform. She then advised me to simply insert the paragraph into my paper, word for word without any citation.

A fellow student of mine was told by his advisor to do the same thing in his paper during a similar consultation. The instructor even said that the student was lucky to have the resource in electronic format, because then he could just cut and paste straight into his paper.

I was incredibly curious about all of this, so I asked Danil (my personal language tutor) about it. He said that everyone does it and that professors have just come to accept it; all you have to do is cut and paste a few pages, chop out the paragraph headings, and you’ve got yourself a paper. Another Russian student sitting at the table shook his head in agreement.

So where does that leave me?

I’ve decided not to just shrug it off with a ‘When in Rome. . .’ excuse. My paper is my going to be my own original thoughts and conclusions; citations will be used wherever necessary. That of course makes my project more difficult and time-consuming, but I know I’ll take more pride in the final product as a result.