Plagiarism In Academic Institutes

In life, everybody needs to win. Be better, stand out, get attention, for better or for worse. But then again sometimes we do things the way that is just not the right way to be done. In my undergrad I did most of the projects alone, because well, I could not find anybody to work with me or me not being ready to work with somebody else. At my institute here, however things were quite different. Most of the projects I have done, have been team projects, and I have always had the privilege to work with some of the best people around, it was always fun staying awake the whole days the whole nights and trying to find the "best" way to do the projects. There have been few others who took the easy way out, "referring" other people code and any other easy way to get the job done. A lot of times when you talk to anybody who does plagiarism, everybody has a reason. Some have "genuine" reasons, the project was too complex, and they could not do it by themselves. But then again, I know people who have done this more than once. And they have some how run out of genuine reasons. We all talk about them, but then again rarely do we talk about the reasons and the motivations behind these people. I can only talk about my own experiences. At my institute most professors encourage everybody to do their projects on their own, few of them have somehow encouraged "reusability" which has often been extended to just "copy paste work". But the thing is everybody says the people who do such things will one day be caught, one day they would be noticed. But then again, I think a lot needs to be done with the system itself only. The system may not encourage people to refer other people code, but then again on the other hand it does not even discourage people from doing so. Some of the reasons I think plagiarism is high in an academic institute are.

1) At a lot of these places, the course content remains the same for several years and so do the projects. In a Software engineering project, everybody might have to make a website, your seniors did that, so did their seniors and so did theirs, such kind of "hierarchical" projects encourage people to take code from some where in the hierarchy. Similar is the case with several of the courses like Databases, in which everybody might have to make a database engine, the same thing that might have been done for just far too many years now.

2) The lack of mechanisms, the mechanisms to detect plagiarism just don't seem to be present in Indian institutes, there are no code repositories, of previous batches wherein the code automatically goes through a process for the same.

3) Most of the professors don't give a damn about it. They are happy to see a working interface, a nice GUI that does not have pink color in the interface, and if you press "(" in the name field, it should pop up a message immediately. But none of them actually bothering to even listen to the design and the rationale for the project, the code organization or the coding standards. Why would students bother to learn or spend time on those things if some other guy who will focus more on the presentation or the GUI will end up getting more recognition or a better grade than you. All they want is some program working. This is something you expect from some professors but definitely not those who teach you about morality and telling you what is right and what is wrong, in life.

4) The evaluation, a lot of times, is delegated to Teaching Assistants; T.A though supposed to do the evaluation honestly have other motivations going on in his head while evaluating in such scenarios. Someone might have a crush on someone, someone might have had a fight with someone in the mess, and the evaluation turns out to be a play ground to settle all personal scores, once and for all.

What do you think? Do you think that our academic institutes need to look into how the things are being done, or how they can prevent such things from happening again and again, and well again.

Update: Tarandeep pointed me out to an article by Neil R. Wagner, which talks about academic dishonesty and also points out some statistics about Plagiarism at MIT.