undergraduate

On May 29th, twenty universities met to create a network to maintain academic integrity. A workshop was jointly organized by the FACE Club at Hoa Sen University and the Towards Transparency organization.

 

University representatives stated the occurrence of plagiarism violations had now become a serious concern. Dr. Pham Quoc Loc, Vice-Provost of Hoa Sen University, explained that some students asked very awkward questions, such as, “If I don’t plagiarize, what can I get?” which has led to a decision to increase student awareness of the issue. His university has founded an Academic Integrity Committee, purchased the Turnitin plagiarism detection software and started to give citation training.

Dr. Vo Thanh Hai, Vice-Provost of Duy Tan University, reported on the results of a survey a few years ago. In response to the question, “Have you ever copied an original piece by an author on the internet without citing the source?” 49% answered yes. When asked why they had not cited their source, 36% responded “I don’t know how to cite”, 12% answered “I didn’t remember the author”, and 15% said “I couldn’t write it any better, so I copied it”.

Mr. Nguyen Van Trung, Director of the Center of Educational Testing and Quality Assurance at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Transport, explained that plagiarism is now very prevalent at universities. Students copy from previous students and postgraduates copy from undergraduates.  “The danger is that people will start considering this as normal behavior”, he said. Dr. Tran Long Giang of the Maritime University observed that plagiarism has escalated since the birth of the internet.

To try to solve this problem, most universities reported that were installing anti-plagiarism software. The Turnitin software at Hoa Sen and Maritime University can scan 4.5 billion internet websites to detect similarities in theses and projects. Software developed at Duy Tan University also scans documents and compares them to students’ papers. Dr. Phan Huy Hung, Director of the Can Tho University Quality Assurance and Testing Center, also reported that his university is writing software to detect plagiarism.

However, Mr. Pham Anh Duong of Towards Transparency raised the question, “Which data sources do those programs use? Do they only detect plagiarism within one university, or do they operate at a national level?” Many of the representatives agreed that a poor and incomplete database, based on limited data from one university only, would not solve the problem. Students would still be able to get their sources from other universities, without their local anti-plagiarism software detecting it. The universities all agreed to form a network called “Universities Act for Academic Integrity” and to work together to share databases to coordinate the implementation of their anti-plagiarism software.