ความคิดเห็นที่ 2
The Plagiarism Hunter
When one graduate student went to the library, he found copycats — lots of them By PAULA WASLEY
Athens, Ohio
In a conference room in Ohio University's Vernon R. Alden Library, Thomas A. Matrka takes just 15 minutes to hit pay dirt.
Scattered before him on a table are 16 chemical-engineering master's theses on "multiphase flow." He examines them in pairs. With a hand on each manuscript, eyes darting back and forth, he quickly scans the pages.
Identical diagrams in two theses from 1997 and 1998 strike him as suspicious. Turning a few more pages, he confirms what he suspected.
"This one needs to be turned in," he says, pointing to an introductory chapter that not only mirrors the structure and content of the earlier one, but also includes whole paragraphs that are virtually identical. "This guy didn't do a literature review," he says. "His literature review was opening this guy's and copying it."
He reaches for another thesis. "Give me time," he says. "I'll find some more."
Over the past two years, ferreting out plagiarism has become Tom Matrka's hobby, maybe even his obsession. And he's gotten very good at it. So adept, in fact, that the former graduate student at Ohio University — now a project engineer at a nearby explosives factory — has single-handedly blown the lid off a huge plagiarism scandal at his alma mater. Dozens of former students are now caught up in the investigation, several professors have been reprimanded, and the university is wrestling with how one department fostered a culture of academic cheating.
Regardless of whether Mr. Matrka was driven by revenge or ethics, this much is certain: The scandal would never have erupted without one graduate student's doggedness.
Back to School
Tom Matrka always wanted to go to graduate school. And, at 37, the timing seemed right. With a decade of work as an engineer under his belt, he had his debts under control. He enrolled in the mechanical-engineering master's program at Ohio University. "I love this stuff," he says. "I really enjoyed being in school." So when in the spring of 2003, about six months into his master's degree, his adviser, M. Khairul Alam, invited the straight-A student to stay on to complete a Ph.D., it was, he says, "almost like a dream come true."
But a year later, the dream soured. Maybe it was because he had turned down a campus job Mr. Alam arranged for him. Maybe it was because he had decided to work with another professor on his Ph.D. research. Or maybe, he says, Mr. Alam just didn't like him. Whatever the reason, Mr. Matrka says, suddenly nothing seemed to please his adviser.
Mr. Matrka submitted several drafts of a thesis proposal — a formality, he thought, since he had already completed his research — and each time his adviser proclaimed it inadequate. To Mr. Matrka, it looked as if Mr. Alam was purposely holding him back while letting other, less-qualified students pass through. "He was holding me to a different standard," says Mr. Matrka. (Mr. Alam declined to comment for this article.)
Mr. Matrka sought the advice of the university ombudsman, who suggested that looking at completed theses might give Mr. Matrka a better idea of what Mr. Alam was looking for. So Mr. Matrka went to the library.
With characteristic meticulousness, Mr. Matrka read all the theses on the shelves that related to his topic — the thermal conductivity of carbon panels. He learned about the library's off-site archive and requested a few reports from there that also sounded promising.
It was then that he noticed something strange about one of the theses.
"I'm looking at it," he says now, "and I'm like, wait a minute, I just saw this upstairs the other day."
There were indeed some remarkable similarities. The first 50 pages of a 1999 master's thesis, approved by Mr. Alam, reproduced verbatim the introductory chapters of a thesis completed by another student of Mr. Alam's only a year earlier. "I was shocked," says Mr. Matrka. "I couldn't believe it."
Evidently neither could anyone else. Mr. Matrka took the 1999 thesis as well as a few other, less egregious plagiarism examples to the ombudsman, Elizabeth E. Graham. He notified the university's judiciary director. He brought up his discovery in a meeting with Dennis Irwin, dean of the college of engineering, who joked that chasing plagiarism could land Mr. Matrka in court. He laid his stack of theses on the desk of Jerrel Mitchell, then associate dean for research and graduate studies, and said, "I think you'd be interested in these." Mr. Mitchell's answer, according to Mr. Matrka, was unequivocal. "No, I wouldn't," he said as he handed them back. (Mr. Mitchell confirms that he declined to read them.)
With his complaints unheeded and his hopes of entering the Ph.D. program fading, Mr. Matrka kept digging. Over the next four months, he spent his lunch breaks, sometimes up to 10 hours a week, in the library looking through old theses written for the mechanical-engineering department. Turning up more plagiarism didn't take long, he says. He just looked for items with similar names or topics, and there it was.
Two theses copied pages from textbooks he had on his own bookshelf, he says. Some, including a 2002 thesis that had 14 consecutive pages in common with a 2000 manuscript, even reproduced past theses' typos and misspellings. Two theses, approved one year apart by the same adviser, had 12 identical pages, and identical titles.
One 2003 thesis was a veritable smorgasbord of plagiarism, replicating five pages from a 2002 thesis, nine pages from a textbook on "flow-induced vibration," and five more pages taken from Japanese journal articles.
The more he found, the easier it was to spot. By late November, he had turned up nearly 30 theses, most by international students, that appeared to include plagiarized material.
Quest for Fairness
Tom Matrka would seem an unlikely candidate to take on a university. An extra-wholesome version of the mustachioed Brawny Man, with a bashful smile and the broad chest of someone who dabbles in construction, he is almost excessively polite, the type that arrives on the dot and apologizes for keeping you waiting.
But what he lacks in obstreperousness, he makes up for in patience and persistence. He takes pride in long-term projects, such as the house he is building for himself in the woods, or his six-year-long effort to master the guitar by picking out classic rock tunes every night. By comparison, unearthing 300 pages' worth of plagiarism was an easy task. "Some people like to do crossword puzzles or read books," he says. "I like to read the work of OU grads."
Some people at Ohio explain Mr. Matrka's tenacious rooting out of plagiarism as score settling. (In one e-mail message to a faculty member, Mr. Mitchell, the former associate dean, described Mr. Matrka as "some crazy guy" who got frustrated after his adviser wouldn't approve his thesis.) But Mr. Matrka insists there is nothing personal about his obsessive reading habits. He has never met most of the theses' authors, and those that he has met he describes as "nice guys." Instead, he casts his investigation as a quest for "consistency" and fair treatment. The university, he says, held him to a double standard, keeping him back for a year and scuttling his Ph.D. ambitions while turning a blind eye to a pattern of cheating and plagiarism that dates back 20 years. And that, he says, made his blood boil.
"I told everybody, and everybody was just blowing it off," he says.
Over the course of about a year, starting in December 2004, he wrote letters — to the accreditors, to the chairman of the State Board of Regents, to the chairman of the university's Board of Trustees, to the university's president, even to the governor. He sent an e-mail message to a professor whose textbook had been copied. He wrote the dean of the libraries and cornered circulation librarians about the outrage on the shelves. He spoke out against rampant plagiarism before a graduate-student senate meeting. No one seemed to listen.
จากคุณ :
B.F.Pinkerton (กายทิพย์)
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18 ม.ค. 50 23:35:39
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