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.

“There are many, many myths people hold about copyright law. However, the most dangerous by far is the myth of poor man’s copyright (PMC).”

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.