How Chinese universities are tackling plagiarism - and is it working?
- Tertiary institutions are setting limits on the amount of material that students can duplicate in dissertations
- Some academics have doubts, saying there should be a zero-tolerance policy on plagiarism
Students at Hunan University of Technology in central China get two chances.
From May, each undergraduate has two opportunities to check their final dissertation with an online database to see how much of each paper’s content is copied from existing publications.
The service is free and the checks are offered before the papers are formally submitted. After that, a thesis will automatically fail if more than 35 per cent of its content is deemed duplicated, according to a notice issued in early May.
The university is one of a growing number around the country introducing such tools to clamp down on plagiarism on campus. The drive has spawned an online industry in checking services and follows a number of high-profile cases of copied dissertations.
But some academics have doubts about allowing a fixed percentage of copied material, saying there should be a zero-tolerance policy towards content duplication.
