Tuesday 27 July 2010

plagiarism

There is much talk of foreign universities setting up shop in India. I wonder how the students will take to it. One problem may be the fees. But a more important problem would be the way they learn.
We have some MSc courses in our college though thankfully none in Chemistry. They have an annual lecture series in which they have some talks by profs/scientists. They then have poster presentations.
Now these posters by MSc students are just an extension of what they did for the school science fair in class VII. They have a chart paper-- preferably black. On it they paint a nice silver border. Very pretty! Then they choose a topic . Next, they google the topic, select first 7 or 8 sites, and at random copy paste some bits from each website. This they print out (not even changing font size) , cut out the prints, paste them artistically on the black chart paper .. and lo behold a POSTER!!.
They have no idea that this amounts to plagiarism or that this is not what a poster is supposed to be like at their level.
These students have regularly won poster competitions both in our own college and elsewhere. So I think this is how posters are made everywhere.

2 comments:

bythewindowsill said...

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/article532004.ece

reminded me of your post.
how have you been... enjoyed your posts on plagiarism and the 18-year-old's conversation.
~w.s. :-) :-)

L said...

ws: thanks. Will read the link.
Do give your readers some more of the less-common bits from the Mahabharatha.

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