Academic
Integrity: Policy and Regulations
The draft regulations issued by the University
Grants Commission (UGC) on September 1, to curb plagiarism in the country are most
welcome and a timely step, in view of the rising plagiarism and ubiquity of
other kinds of unethical academic practices. An elaborate academic integrity policy
at university level, coupled with the aforesaid stern regulations at the
national level, as issued recently by the UGC1, can well curb the
menace of all kinds of ongoing academic dishonesty, including plagiarism. The
University Grants Commission (UGC) has recently released these Draft
regulations entitled, UGC (Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of
Plagiarism in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations 2017 for discussions
and invited responses of stakeholders till September 30, on curbing plagiarism.
The aim of these regulations is also to create requisite academic awareness
among the scholars and faculty members. The UGC has revealed its concern
towards plagiarism and is also endeavouring to invoke responsible conduct in
all researches, and prevent misconduct, including plagiarism, in the academic
writings2. Penal provisions
have also been proposed in these proposed regulations. The draft, indeed also seeks
to establish institutional mechanism for the promotion of academic integrity
and develop systems to detect and prevent plagiarism. The draft proposes
to direct every Higher Education
Institute (HEI) to instruct students, faculty, and staff about proper
attribution, seeking permission of the author wherever necessary,
acknowledgement of source compatible with the needs and specificities of
disciplines and in accordance with rules and regulations governing the source.’’3
Stern punishments are proposed in the regulations for the candidates as well as
for their supervisors for acts of plagiarism. However, certain other forms of
academic dishonesty also need to be covered in the regulations and be curbed
sternly. Some such dishonest policies are-data
fabrication, contract cheating, availing of paid services, professional
misconduct, false and non-confirmable experimental or trial results, frivolous
or fraudulent reports, sabotage, dry-labbing and bribed reports.
The quality deficit syndrome, infesting dimensions
of academic performance in the country, including the teaching, examinations, research,
publications, faculty recruitment & development, poor employability of
passouts, poor intellectual property creation,
mediocracy and poor world ranking of Indian
universities as well as of the elite institutes, can largely be remedied by
combating the academic dishonesty, prevalent in various forms in certain
quarters. Recently, some persons, holding high positions in some of the Indian
Universities, including the Central Universities, too have faced charges of
plagiarism, and have invited stern action for plagiarism, even including
dismissals from job. Still, the growing incidents of plagiarism are very
unfortunate and disappointing for the current educational scenario and the
standards in the country. Plagiarism is considered as an academic sin by the universities
all over the world. So, stern law and regulations are needed in India as well in
this regard. A large majority of Euro-American and Australian universities already
have elaborate Academic Integrity Policies and Copyrights Policies for the purpose.
Plagiarism:
Basically the “Plagiarism” has been derived from the
Latin word “Plagiare” means “to kidnap or abduct”. Indeed to plagiarize means
stealing and passing off the ideas or words of someone else as one’s own. It is
a form of literary or scientific theft and be taken at par with theft or fraud
because it contains both, elements i.e., stealing someone else’s work and lying
about it afterwards i.e. commitment of fraud. So, to use or incorporate someone
else’s work into one’s own work, without an acknowledgement is known as
“PLAGIARISM”. It is one of the most severe violation of the Academic writing,
and bane of quality in education, research and publications.
Need
to Stress for Paraphrasing with Citations: If proper
Paraphrasing is done in any written work and the source of the work has been cited
to avoid attracting of charge of plagiarism or cheating, then it does not fall
in the category of plagiarism. Paraphrasing is restating another person’s work
in our own way, so the credit must be given to the real owner of the
intellectual property in the work. For this purpose ‘’The Higher Education
Institutes are therefore also required, under these new regulations of
September 1, to conduct sensitization
seminars and awareness programmes on responsible conduct of research, project
work, assignment, thesis, dissertation, promotion of academic integrity and
ethics in education for students, faculty and other members of academic staff.’’4
It would caution all the
stakeholders.
Growing
Menace:
The plagiarism, whether wittingly
or unwittingly, is spreading across all academic pursuits, viz, course work
assignments, summer internship reports, project dissertation for PG or Ph. D
programmes, articles, research papers, books being authored and so on. Complaints
against plagiarism are on the rise. But, due to lack of formal norms and
provisions of penalty or punishment against plagiarism being proven beyond
doubt also used to go unpenalised, leading to decline in the quality of
research and publications in the country. Therefore, ‘’The institutes have also
being instructed through these new and proposed regulations to implement
adequate software and other mechanisms which would ensure that thesis, dissertation
or any other such documents submitted are free of plagiarism.’’3 ‘’The
UGC has asked all the State and Central universities to use anti-plagiarism
software to check duplication of Ph.D. theses. Making it mandatory for the
university to use anti-plagiarism software before awarding Ph.D.s, the UGC has
recommended ‘URKUND’ software.’’5
Plagiarism is not confined in academic field alone,
recently an allegation of plagiarism was leveled even against the Division
Bench of the Delhi High Court by the Spicy IP blog on December 1, 2015. The
Delhi High Court Bench was alleged by the complainant, of having plagiarised
thirty three paras in its judgment in Roche V. Cipla case from a law review
article written by Swetashree Majumdar and Eashan Ghosh in the Queen Mary
Journal of Intellectual Property. The Delhi High Court acknowledged plagiarism
in the order passed on 8th December, 2015 and apologised to the authors8.
The responsibility of the plagiarism has devolved upon an intern who had
written the precise facts of the case. Though such an instance is only single. However
the copyright law needs to be revamped to take care of such incidents. But,
rapidly growing incidents are most worrisome in the academic circles. What
would be the ultimate fate of our Education System, having chronic quality
deficit if plagiarism would perpetual. So,
the growing incidents of plagiarism in the academic field are quite worrisome,
and the UGC has taken a right step.
Reflection
on Quality
Rapid spread of this sinister termite of plagiarism
has been eating the quality of our academics and has been perpetuating unabated
for want of any formal norms, penalties or punishments for incidents of such
rising academic dishonesty. For stealing a petty sum or any material property
or on kidnapping, the culprit is liable to be penalized and imprisoned. But, on
stealing or kidnapping another person’s intellectual property, comprising
ideas, inventions, original work, authorships or findings etc largely the
culprit goes unscathed and unpenalised, for want of any relevant law. Further,
the students, scholars and even faculty members using other person’s work as
their own work for self enhancement, extinguish real work and scuttle quality.
The plagiarism has not been confined to students and fresh scholars alone but,
many high profile academic luminaries, have also attracted prosecutions. Today,
the quality deficit in academics is so severe, that India ranks at 60th
rank in the Global Innovations Index (GII)7 and has hardly 20
universities in the top 959 QS World University Rankings, and only towards the
tail end. In the Global Research citations frequency India has 3.1% share,
inspite of being home to 17.8% of world population and 20% of global youth,
wherein 3.5 crore students pursuing higher education in India, are almost equal
to the entire population of Canada. To the contrary, UK has only 1% of the
world population. Yet, it has 15.8% share of the world’s most highly-cited
articles9. International research citations.
Need
to Broaden the Scope
The scope of the regulations on promotion of
academic integrity need to be further broad based to cover other forms of
academic dishonesty. The regulations must take care of certain other acts of
commission, stated henceforth:
(i)
Fabrication:
Another
major act of academic dishonesty, quite prevalent in the country is fabrication
which means concoction or falsification of data, information and citations. It
is nonetheless than a grave fraud to give false empirical data in support of
unsustainable and false claims responsible for misleading conclusions, away
from any reality. All such claims of so called fake researches can play havoc,
if used in reality in the area of wealth care, agrochemicals etc. as they would
be totally misleading. Fabrication
is an easy and quick method of falsification of data, information, or citations
in any formal academic exercise with an intent to skip real work. This includes
making up citations to back up arguments or inventing quotations. Fabrication
predominates in the natural sciences, but not alien to social sciences as well,
where students sometimes falsify data to make experiments work. It includes
data falsification, in which false claims are made about research performed,
survey conducted or experiment claimed to have been conducted, including
selective submitting of results to exclude inconvenient data for generating
bogus data.
Bibliographical references are often
fabricated or copied or imported from other works, especially when a certain
minimum number of references is required or considered sufficient for the
particular kind of paper. This type of fabrication can range from referring to
works whose titles look relevant or whose titles are quoted by other
researchers, but which the student concerned did not read.
The most sinister category of fabrication
is signing of reports, provided by the companies sponsoring trials of their
pharma or agrochemical molecule(s) by the academic fraternity, without actual trail
or without regard to their own real trail results.
(ii)
Dry Labbing:
There is also a growing tendency of dry-labbing in physical sciences and other lab
related technical courses or experiments, in which the teacher expects that the
student’s experiments, should yield results, which confirm the established law
or principle. ‘’In the most benign sense, a “dry lab” refers to a facility in
which computer simulations of scientific hypotheses are performed. This term is
in contrast to a “wet lab,” a facility in which equipment and personnel exist
to perform hands-on scientific research and experimentation. However, most of
the time, “dry lab” is used as a verb, and means that supposed lab data was
actually created on paper only, usually to conform to some desired result. In
other words, to dry lab is to cheat, plain and simple. As you might expect,
there are varying degrees of this practice’’10. Unscrupulous student
sometimes start from the results and works backward, in the style of reverse
engineering, calculating what the experimental data should be even sometimes
adding variation to the data. In some cases, the lab report is written before
the experiment is conducted—in some cases, the experiment is never carried out.
In either case, the results are what the instructor expects. Even when the
season for that experiment to be conducted and data are manipulated.
(iii) Other Kinds of Dishonesty: There
are several other dishonest copycat project reports by replacing the academic
practices like contract cheating and engaging or hiring third party commercial
agencies to complete a project or write a dissertation. Deception, bribery,
impersonation, sabotage of others work are also quite frequent these days.
Professional misconduct, including harassment of feminine scholars all need to
be curbed.
Legal Position and Action Required
There has been no law, regulations or policy to curb
academic dishonesty in the country hitherto. Whereas, in several countries majority
of the universities have their own elaborate Academic Integrity Policies. In
view of the rising incidents of all kinds of dishonest practices, need was
being felt for a national law or regulations to be invoked. So, the draft
regulations of the UGC would go in a being way to deal with the situation. As
on date, there is no such defind right for the creator of any intellectual
property to be protected against plagiarisation, as it is not recognised by any
law in India. Though, the section 57 of the Indian Copyright Act, 1957 gives
authors inter alia, the right to claim authorship. Section 63 of the same Act
considers infringement of copyright as a criminal offence and awards
punishment. On conviction, the
infringers may be awarded imprisonment. They have also to compensate the
aggrieved party in monetary terms for the act of infringing. But, ordinarily,
Plagiarism is not dealt under copyright laws. So, culprits go unscathed.
So, it is most appropriate, when the UGC has already
took the initiative to come up with a comprehensive Draft Academic Integrity
Policy and Regulations, with suitable preventive, remedial and penal measures.
At a time when, plagiarism and other dishonest practices are acquiring alarming
proportions, a national law to amend the existing copyright law, to curb such
practices, with elaborate rules would also be a most welcome step. To remedy
the present quality deficit syndrome from higher education, including research,
publications and innovations, vis a vis global standards, the scope of
regulations may be broadbased to cover data fabrication, contract cheating,
availing of paid services, professional misconduct, false and non-confirmable
experimental or trial results, frivolous or fraudulent reports, sabotage
dry-labbing and bribed reports.
References
1.
UGC circular No. F.1-18/2010 (CPP-II)
dated the 1st September, 2017 accompanied by the Draft regulations at www.ugc.ac.in/pdfnews/8864815_UGC-Public-Notice-on-Draft_Regulations,-2017.pdf
2. UGC UGC draft new policy to check plagiarism in academic research, http://www.ndtv.com/education/ugc-drafts-new-policy-to-check-plagiarism-in-academic-research-1745424
3.
ibid
4.
ibid
5.
ibid
6. UGC mandates universities to check
theses with anti-plagiarism software, http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Tiruchirapalli/ugc-mandates-universities-to-check-theses-with-antiplagiarism-software/article7938979.ece
7.
Economic Times, June 16, 2017, India
climbs global innovation charts for second year in a row.
8.
Ashok KM, Live Law. in, Delhi High Court
apologizes to authors for copying their article in the judgement; takes
corrective action, December 9, 2015
9.
Iris Kisjes, Elsevier Elsevier Connect
Report: How do the large research nations compare? The UK ‘punches above its weight,’ surpassing US
in research quality Posted on 10 December 2013
10.
By Michael D. Shaw Dry Labbing And How
It Might Be Affecting You April 23, 2012, Interscan Corporation
www.gasdetection.com/interscan-in-the-news/magazine-articles/dry-labbing-might-affecting/
