Dear Prudence: Plagiarism

[cereta]

Dear Prudence,
I am a graduate student who is finishing my master's thesis. For inspiration, my professor suggested that I look at the thesis of a student who graduated last year and tackled a similar topic. He said it was of the quality that I should be aiming for. I got the thesis and found that most of it is plagiarized word-for-word from a book that I have been using as a source. The subject is rather obscure, and I would not expect my professor to be familiar with the plagiarized book, but I still can't believe that the student got away with it. I don't know what to do. On one hand, I feel it's none of my business, but on the other, I feel the school should know. I also can't help but think that if I don't speak up, during the grading process, my paper will be compared to his, which actually was written by the master in this field.

—Just Want To Graduate

Dear Just,
This is your business. You know that a fellow student has been given a degree—and set upon the world of academia—based on lies and theft. It may reflect his good taste that he chose to pass off as his own the superb, if conveniently obscure, research of the true author. But now that you have discovered this violation of everything scholarship is supposed to stand for, you must expose it. Take the book and the thesis and highlight a generous selection of relevant passages. Bring it to your professor and explain that as soon as you started reading the thesis, it was obvious it was a work of plagiarism. Let's hope this prompts an investigation and a stripping of this young man's graduate degree. He can then redirect his energies to a line of work more appropriate for someone with his morals—I hear there are openings in the field of mortgage-backed securities.

—Prudie

Comments

[cereta]

I concur with Prudie. That's a pretty damned serious offense, against academia, against ethics, and against everyone who has ever earned that degree through their own labor. I've been a teacher long enough to have some generosity of spirit on the subject, in that a significant percentage (not a majority, but not a trivial number) of students who plagiarize in my classes do so because they're in a bad place and don't know how to get out, but I still don't give them credit for the assignment. The person didn't earn that degree, and yes, as the commenter pointed out, set a standard that other students will be held to unfairly.

[zulu]

Oh, wow, what a thing to discover! Yeah, my instinct would be very much to take it to my prof and quite possibly higher than that. I am right in the middle of my master's thesis and I would be absolutely bowled over and furious if I found that someone had routed around the work that's supposed to go into one of these things!

[daedala]

Shades of Gaudy Night....

That said? If the professor had been that student's adviser, I might go to the dean instead. But then, I have very little trust and respect for my adviser right now; while she hasn't, so far as I know, been presiding over plagiarized theses/final projects, she has been using examples that have incorrect references, and her favorite example used astrology charts as supposedly-useful psychological insight into the subjects.

[ladydreamer]

I completely agree. And knowing that the university's reputation is on the line, the sooner they expose the plagiarism and the more appropriately they deal with the consequences, the better. They can't afford to ignore issues like this, lest people later find more examples and suggest that they have been graduating masters for years who don't deserve the title. That hurts everyone.