MHRD allows universities to use 'Turnitin' software to curb PhD plagiarism

The ministry of HRD also announced that those students whose dissertation is found to be plagiarized will not get their doctorate degree this year

HRD minister Prakash Javadekar has announced the introduction of 'Turnitin' software to curb plagiarism, widely prevalent in academic research in India.

Plagiarism is a type of cheating where a person steals someone else’s idea and uses it in his own work. It is a gnawing issue in India’s academia for years and even top academicians have fallen prey to it. The government's move is expected to ensure integrity in scholarly work.

"The Central government has taken strong steps to keep a check on such practices of plagiarism in PhD research. One person's PhD thesis has been wrongly used by some others to complete their theses. As such cases are on the rise, we have decided to use software such as 'Turnitin' and others to keep a check on such theses," Javadekar told reporters on June 25.

The HRD ministry also announced that students whose dissertations are found to be plagiarized will not get their doctorate degrees this year. The MHRD had recently made PhDs mandatory for teaching at the university level starting 2021.

The decision came after the UGC draft policy for anti-plagiarism that was drafted in September 2017. This year in April, the UGC approved the UGC regulations 2018 (Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism in Higher Education Institutions) in its meeting held on March 20. 

The government has recently proposed to repeal UGC and is planning to set up Higher Education Commission of India (HECI), another major step taken to overhaul the higher education system. The ministry has asked educationists, general public,and all the stakeholders to give suggestions on this new proposal by the evening of July 7. 

HIGHLIGHTS OF UGC's DRAFT LEGISLATION ON PLAGIARISM FOR STUDENTS AND TEACHERS

* Researchers will lose their registration and teachers their jobs, if their works are found to be plagiarised.

* Graded punishment has been prescribed based on the severity of offences.

FOR STUDENTS

If the plagiarisation is found to be 10-40 per cent, then the researcher has to re-submit his revised thesis. If 40-60 per cent of the content is plagiarised, the student will be deprived of submitting the revised thesis for one year. And if the plagiarisation goes above 60 per cent, the registration of the student will be cancelled permanently.

FOR TEACHERS

In case of 10-40 per cent plagiarism, the teacher will have to withdraw the manuscript. The teacher will be debarred to supervise Masters/Phd or Mphil students for 2 years, and will be denied to a single annual increment in case of 40-60 per cent plagiarism.  If it's above 60 per cent, the teacher will be suspended or dismissed.

WHAT IS TURNITIN

Turnitin is software that is meant to prevent the menace of plagiarism and ensure originality in the content. The official website of Turnitin says its software is a tool that helps "educators (and their students) make informed evaluations.” Turnitin software checks papers against over 20 billion web pages, over 220 million student papers and over 90,000 publications.

HOW RELIABLE IS TURNITIN?

US-based Turnitin says that this software does not detect plagiarism. Instead, it provides you with the 'amount of similarity' in a work with the original work, and leaves it to the evaluator to determine plagiarism. Hence, the “Similarity Index” is not exactly a “plagiarism index”, and also there will be an automated score that can be “good” or “bad”. To be precise, the percentage of the “Similarity Index” of the work detected by Turnitin doesn’t mean it is certainly plagiarised.

The company says that even “0% does not necessarily mean that everything is OK with the student’s paper and 75% does not necessarily mean that the student should flunk. You have to look at the report and decide: what is going on here?”

GLOBAL EXAMPLES OF TURNITIN USAGE

In September 2017, the Jakarta State University was hit by a doctoral degree scam. The rector of the university promoted more candidates than the stipulated limit over a period of five years (2012-2016). It was later found that 74% of dissertations had similarities with other writings, and that was detected by Turnitin software.

US President Donald Trump's wife, Melania Trump, found herself in an online plagiarism row when her speech at the Republican National Convention 2016 sounded similar to a speech by Michelle Obama in 2008. Trump's speech contained both examples of "cloning" (copying passages word for word) and "find-and-replace" plagiarism (copying a passage but changing a few keywords), Turnitin found.

MHRD TAKE ON PLAGIARISM

According to NDTV, now every supervisor will have to submit a certificate indicating that the work done by the researcher under his/her guidance is original with no plagiarism. Moreover, all higher education institutes will have to design a policy on anti-plagiarism mandatorily and get it approved by the relevant statutory body of the university.

Besides, institutes are also required to submit soft copies of all M.Phil. and PhD dissertations on INFLIBNET. 

PLAGIARISM IN INDIA

According to Hindustan Times, in 2016  vice-chancellor Chandra Krishnamurthy of The Pondicherry University had to quit her job after a prolonged stand-off with the HRD ministry, following allegations that she plagiarised large parts of one of her books. Seven Stanford University professors wrote to then President APJ Abdul Kalam about Kumaon University Vice-Chancellor BS Rajput on the issue. University of Hyderabad Vice-Chancellor Appa Rao Podile was accused of plagiarizing his thesis from not one, but three scientific papers. 

(With inputs from PTI)