This story is from June 25, 2019

PhD dissertations fail plagiarism test in Osmania University

PhD dissertations fail plagiarism test in Osmania University
Osmania University
HYDERABAD: A year after the Osmania University (OU) made plagiarism check mandatory for PhD thesis, the varsity observed an average 30-40% similarity index in every thesis submitted by research scholars. Annually, the OU awards nearly 400 PhD degrees. Until last year, the OU did not have any checks in place to verify the authenticity of the thesis being submitted. However, in July, 2018, OU became the first state university in Telangana to introduce anti-plagiarism software Turnitin, which officials claim has emerged as a boon for them.

In the last one year, the university has verified nearly 900 thesis of which officials claim nearly 200 had plagiarised content of up to 40-50%. In fact, in some cases, the university found the similarity index to be as high as 75-90%.
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Sample this: A journalism student who was pursuing research on media organisations submitted first draft of thesis recently. Officials were shocked to know that the similarity index was as high as 90% as he copy pasted paragraphs from other published research papers, blogs and websites.
Another student from the philosophy department committed similar mistake by blatantly picking up content from different websites and research papers. “Research scholars lift content from other research papers, blogs, news articles, etc. In majority cases, the introduction, literature review and discussion parts of the thesis is plagiarised,” said AS Chakravarthy, assistant professor & coordinator of anti-plagiarism software at OU. He added that although research scholars are allowed to rewrite thesis only thrice after running it through the software, many of them end up rewriting it up to 10 times.

Supervisors blame it on lack of comprehension skills among research scholars which forces them to plagiarise content. “In OU, many students pursuing research have studied in Telugu medium till degree level. To pursue research in English emerges as a major challenge for them, so they end up copying,” said Prof D Ravinder, principal of OU Arts College, adding that if research scholars are allowed to submit thesis in Telugu or Urdu, the quality of research will be much better.
OU vice-chancellor S Ramachadram attributed lack of student-teacher relationship to plagiarism. “If there is proper guidance from the faculty, students wouldn’t want to indulge in plagiarism. Internal mechanism of regular reviews by supervisors and corrections by students is absent,” he said, adding that OU is trying to address the issue by setting up a core committee to look into the quality of thesis.
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