An associate professor at a Chinese university has been punished after students reported finding an online test, from another college, that matched an open-book exam in his course.
The Shanghai Daily reports that the professor, Wang Hongtao, resigned from his position as deputy dean of Tongji University’s department of education and research. He will be ineligible for promotion next semester, the newspaper said.
Mr. Wang taught a course on the theory of socialism and Mao Zedong’s philosophy. At the final exam, some students who had brought in a copy of the online test found that the two tests were almost identical. Students later complained to Tongji’s test-affairs office and the president.
Mr. Wang admitted to plagiarizing the test on his blog and apologized, the newspaper reports. “I copied the test paper, which was sent to me by another school’s teacher, for convenience,” he wrote. “I had not searched on the Internet and had no idea that the paper, together with the answers, could be downloaded from the Internet.”
Tongji officials could not be reached on Wednesday for further comment.
9 Responses to Professor at a Chinese University Is Punished for Plagiarizing a Test
rightwingprofessor - March 3, 2010 at 11:44 am
Plagiarism seems to be an important part of Chinese academic culture.
11334522 - March 3, 2010 at 3:45 pm
Having taught in China, I find this story ironic. Chinese students take plagiarism to a level unheard of in the rest of the world. Why should they complain about such acts by their professors?
11159995 - March 3, 2010 at 4:07 pm
Plagiarism is a problem in Chinese culture because it venerates copying the master as a means for achieving professional competence. This attitude derives directly from Confucian values, which still remain strong in China generally and especially among artists and the intelligentsia. Take a look at how Chinese art students mimic their teacher’s style in paintings, for instance, on their way to becoming original artists themselves. But even within Western culture plagiarism has been accepted in various eras more than it is now. For example, Shakespeare is well known to have stolen many of the plots of his plays from earlier writers, and Coleridge’s plagiarism is legendary. A good book on this subject is Richard Posner’s “Little Book of Plagiarism” (Pantheon, 2007). — Sandy Thatcher, Penn State University Press
susangautsch - March 3, 2010 at 4:18 pm
Do we need to stand back for a second and think about what’s going on here? Students plagiarizing work that is intended to assess their knowledge and not someone else’s is a problem because it negates the intended outcomes of the assessment. Journalists plagiarizing is a problem because of proper merit and intellectual property concerns — not to mention lazy journalism. But a teacher plagiarizing a test that is intended to assess the students, not the teacher, is basically a decision not to reinvent a wheel that’s been invented a few million times already. Sure, answers being available on the Internet is a problem with the scenario, but using a test developed by someone else who teaches the same bloody content should not be called “plagiarism.” We have to not lose sight of the goal (that’d be to effectively teach and assess students, btw) and get over ourselves already! Hopefully someone will stand up and announce that we will all start sharing resources and collaborate more so teaching isn’t such a private enterprise with 100,000,000 people in a room reinventing the same round wheel.
12094444 - March 3, 2010 at 4:47 pm
Let me make sure that I do not get in trouble for plagiarizing. In the textbooks that I use for my courses, most of them have chapter exams. I usually tell students to review the chapter exam as part of their study. I usually lift some questions from the chapter exam verbatum or with minor modifications. Is this plagiarism?
drjatcu - March 3, 2010 at 6:15 pm
12094444: No
bethgb - March 3, 2010 at 6:28 pm
To #4 and #5,While I can’t speak to this particular incident, in general, test banks and chapter exams in the U.S. are written with the goal of sharing resources. We textbook exam writers do want other faculty to use the questions we wrote so they don’t have to “reinvent the wheel” and can, instead, spend more time teaching or researching. Please feel free to use chapter exam questions verbatum or with minor modifications: you are not plagiarizing. (But, a lesson here is to first check whether the answers are on the Internet.)– Beth Grobman, De Anza College
mbelvadi - March 4, 2010 at 7:35 am
susangautsch, that was also my response to this story, that it makes no sense at all to label as “plagiarism” the re-use of basic educational materials. Maybe there’s more to it than we know. For instance, if the design of the test is something that the prof takes explicit credit for as part of his application for tenure, including it as evidence of “creative” work on his part, then I could see a problem. We librarians have been sharing our research “subject guides/pathfinders” for decades, across institutions. If it’s just a handout to help students, it seems ridiculous to “cite” the source of every section. But if the librarian submits it in their portfolio as evidence of “scholarly work” (librarians as faculty have some definitions of scholarship in these proceedings that may seem odd to other faculty), then they do have to document which parts they actually wrote themselves.
mbelvadi - March 4, 2010 at 7:39 am
bethgb, I think you, like a great many other people, are confusing plagiarism with copyright infringement. Permission from the author (aka copyright holder) to reuse material without attribution does not affect the question of whether a charge of plagiarism applies, only whether there is copyright infringement. The obvious counterexample is the person who is paid to write an entire term paper for a student. The author is obviously giving the student permission in that transaction to use the work without attribution, but it’s also obviously still plagiarism in the eyes of the professor whose assignment it is submitted for.