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.

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.

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.