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[abuflletcher]

The English department at one big state university has a written departmental policy that regards hiring a grammar and sentence editor to be academic dishonesty, whereas at the same time, in the Education department, with the huge number of foreign graduate students, hiring a copy editor for one's dissertation is standard practice with the professors giving recommendations for good editors.

Hell, >>I<< hired a editor to do the final assembly and ref check on MY dissertation!  The editor was an English prof herself.  I had her combine individual .doc files into one big (REALLY BIG at 500+ pages) master document, so the "smart" page numbering, generate a TOC, and do a final check on the citation and reference formats.  I could have done all of this myself but it saved me a month that I didn't have and was well worth the $300 or so it cost.  BTW, this stuff which might have taken me a month, took her less than a week.

I don't see how there would be any principled way to distinguish this from the sort of editing that many advisors engage in.  I see this as similar to that time in the dark history of sports (anyone see Chariots of Fire?) when hiring a coach to help you train was consider shady and dishonest.  

BTW, at my Japanese SLAC, where our grad students have to write a thesis in English, I have mixed emotions about the use of a proofreader.  In principle I have no objection to having someone "clean up grammar errors" but occassionally my Japanese grads students write such horribly convoluted sentences that the only sort of "correction" possible is to rewrite virtually the entire sentence (often requiring significant alterations in wording).  I guess I feel that they English should generally represent the global English competency of the student since they are graduating from a Language and Culture program -- and will often become EFL teachers at the high school level.

Having written and published numerous articles in Spanish myself, I can better understand the dilemma facing people writing in a language other than their first.  I ALWAYS used a native-speaking proofreader (paying about $10 per page) and I can't see how that in any way would constitute "dishonesty" in a commercial context.  Of course, if would have been dishonest if I had been producing papers to submit for a grade in a Spanish course.  

In the end, like LarryC points out, we need to be able to differentiate between "Johnny copying from Wikipidia the morning the paper's due" from international students who may have legitimate problems that need to be addressed.

Finally, over my 25 years of teaching EFL more and more I've come to feel that speaking a language is a lot like quilting.  People just learning to quilt sew together large squares of "borrowed fabric" is a rather crude and boring pattern.  Master quilters do the same basic thing, but use much smaller bits of fabric and combine them in ever more complex patterns.  In short, it's not about grammar, it's about creative cut 'n paste!  We are ALL plagiarists -- some of us are just more skilled than others.

[abuflletcher]

Something that people should be careful in discussing these things is to overgeneralize about culture, and to label things "Chinese culture" or "East Asian culture."  The things I'm talking about are direct consequences of the way that the school systems are set up, and those were due to some decisions made and aren't unalterable. 

Point well taken.  And ditto on "Western culture."  BTW, I believe the Japanese educational system was copied from the German system.  Many educational terms were borrowed from German.  In fact, still today, Japanese medical students are required to learn the all anatomical terms in Japanese, English (which in this case is mostly Latin), and German.

[sleepynono]

What I say in this post may upset a few people but it is my observation from my own experience.

I think there is a bigger issue other than plagiarism here. The favorism. I was a foreign student and I got my MA in US. I worked very hard to get my degree and it was worthwhile. But not every foreign student was treated equally. The majority of the international students in my university were from South Asia. And there were a few faculty members in the department were from South Asia. Sometime I had to suspect the existence of Double Standard of admission and financial assistance between South Asian students and other foreign students. The professors involved in the Ohio University case were from Sri Lanka and India. Do we know what is the percentage of South Asian students charged of plagiarism? What is the percentage of admission of South Asian students among all applicants in that department?

The South Asian favorism is beyond the campus. My friend applied a faculty position and four out of six placement committee members were from India. He lost the position to a candidate from India who was from a less prestigious university and had a much shorter list of publications. In the company I was working for, I worked on a joint project with another group whose group manager was from India. There were two job openings. All the resumes were prescreened by him then interviewed by a group of people including me. All the candidates sent through him were Indians.

I did not ask you to believe me based on my words. Please, please just open your eyes and observe.

[sibyll]

Finally, over my 25 years of teaching EFL more and more I've come to feel that speaking a language is a lot like quilting.  People just learning to quilt sew together large squares of "borrowed fabric" is a rather crude and boring pattern.  Master quilters do the same basic thing, but use much smaller bits of fabric and combine them in ever more complex patterns.  In short, it's not about grammar, it's about creative cut 'n paste!  We are ALL plagiarists -- some of us are just more skilled than others.

Good point.
As T.S. Eliot once said, "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different."

[spork]

I think the point here is being lost:  what is probably a few professors in one department approving dozens of theses made up of plagiarized material, over a 20 year period.  These professors should be fired because they're not doing their job, which is to train graduate students.  They are lazy and are not meeting widely-accepted standards of academic integrity.

I'm curious as to why Dr. Alam refused to approve one student's thesis work.  Perhaps because that one student refused to join the game and insisted on producing something original?

[pyshnov]

I think the point is completely lost in this discussion. At least all relevant and interesting points are lost.
1. Clearly, a university department encouraged students to give very similar reviews of existing literature on the subject that was the common subject for many theses. It may be a widespread practice for Master theses in many places. It should be regarded as wrong policy rather than plagiarism: the quilt of the students is negligible here.
2. The cause of this practice is clear. Universities are doing technical studies, but these are passed as engineering science. There is no science here. The work of science is a search for the unknown in nature. The best the engineering study is purported to produce is an invention, not a discovery. Probably the research of these students itself contained even less scientific originality than their literature reviews, probably it is just a huge measurement exercise apportioned to the individuals in line for the degrees. What was the students' guilt, I don't get it.
3. The interesting point is the mechanism of how this production line of theses got the huge attention. Mr. Matrka did his job, but this job would have resulted only in his troubles, may be in really big troubles, if THE MEDIA were not responsive. The media makes scandals or it refuses to make a scandal (as in my case, http://ca.geocities.com/uoftfraud/).
4. Not surprisingly, in this forum thread are discussed the "favorism", "equality" and other "issues". Am I seeing what I am seeing - there exists a "Department of White Privilege Studies" in some university? Furthermore, can we conclude that Cincinnati Media was not dominated by Indians and that's why they made the scandal about Ohio University which is full of Indians? You can throw up ten times but this is the reality of universities, probably the only real thing that makes a university community vibrate. And now I tell you why this is going on. That's because there is no real thing, no scientific community that is simply INTERESTED in science and would put this INTEREST high above the social madness. University community has been idiotised, science - corrupted.

[sunny_side_up]

What incentive would an academic department have to allow its grad students, Americans or foreign nationals, to plagiarize theses or dissertations?  Seems a school should have every reason to want to root this out.... but maybe I am naive.

Incentive: less students would graduate because they don't know what the heck they are talking about and professors would actually have to read the stuff to find the plagiarism.

[francie_]

Am I seeing what I am seeing - there exists a "Department of White Privilege Studies" in some university?

Only at Kissyface College, the fictious SLAC we've created here on the CHE fora to satirize the unfortunate trend of Consumerism Gone Wild on college campuses.  See the thread, "KISSYFACE COLLEGE forum" on Meet and Greet.  "Consumer Help Specialist" Spork appointed himself director of Kissyface College's Department of White Studies.

On topic: I believe that the graduate students in this case are every bit of guilty as the unscrupulous faculty member or members who encouraged and approved their wholesale copying of another's work.  I don't care what country a graduate student hails from, by the time he or she enters a graduate program in the U.S., he or she should know what constitutes plagiarism, and that it is wrong, wrong, wrong.

[mehmet_shehu]

What I say in this post may upset a few people but it is my observation from my own experience.

I have personally seen this with my own eyes and agree with you. At the university I taught in before moving, they hired a professor from India in Statistics and within three years ALL the new hires were from India. But not just India, from Kerala - where the original prof was from (of course, the lame admin are to blame here too). The same thing happened in Computing, only there the senior prof was Nigerian and guess who was hired everytime there was a vacancy? And guess which country suddenly started being over-represented on the grad programs?

Of course, the handwringing effete PC liberals will immediately jump in and deny that any such thing could happen. But it did - and does.

BTW, the STRONG rumour about the Computing situation was that the prof was taking a cut from the other Nigerians for "fixing" them a job at the university. And it was a shamefaced Nigerian who fessed this up to a friend who worked in the dept - but there was no evidence so nothing could be done (and the admin were so ridiculous that nothing would've been done anyway).

[abuflletcher]

I saw something like this happen in the Engineering department at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman.  Eventually, it became an all Egyptian department and the profs who officially were supposed to be conducting courses in English as this English-medium university, used nothing but Arabic.

Then there was the "grade selling" scandal among Egyptian professors at Kuwait University...

[spork]

I guess Southern Illinois University can now be added to the list.  Maybe SIU and Ohio University should form their own athletic conference.