AICTE anti-plagiarism drive not practical'

BENGALURU: While the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has decided to take steps to fight plagiarism, professors and students are concerned about the practicalities of the move.

They point out that there are various constraints such as unavailability of appropriate software, working pattern of the process and the overall implementation of the decision.

In its recent circular the AICTE stated that as many as 10,399 technical institutions have been asked to use credible anti-plagiarism software and tools to check all their academic and Research and Development (R&D) related activities, including undergraduate (B.Tech) and postgraduate (M. Tech) project reports, apart from Ph.D thesis and research publications.

Though professors and faculty members of various institutes have welcomed the move, they think the directive will add on to the burden for them as finding a perfect online tool to detect plagiarism, other than the open softwares available at present, is a challenge.

“As technology developed, students have started to use online rephrasing tools to stay safe from plagiarism checks even for class assignments. Such matter then needs human check as most of them fail to convey a meaning. Such software powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) would curb the problem, but by when, is the bigger question,” said Prof Surya Varchasvi, assistant professor at the department of Electronics & Communication at CMR Institute of Technology (CMRIT).

Another constraint is the absence of detailed guidelines on how to put the process into practice. University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering (UVCE) Principal Dr K.R. Venugopal believes a similarity index on the lines of the University Grants Commission (UGC) draft would help managements of technical institutions to take effective actions to curb the menace.

“Undergraduate and postgraduate students should be given a relaxed slab on the similarity index allowing 40% and 35% for them respectively, while doctoral thesis works should be brought under the 20% slab, requiring more originality. While over one billion people are pursuing technical courses in the world, expecting originality in every idea put forth is impractical,” he said.

“As part of formulating the Review of Literature chapter for a dissertation presentation, we had recently found that some paragraphs were copy-pasted and presented to us earlier from a thesis submitted by one of our professors themselves. The focus on this matter should be equally set on professors and researchers as well,” demands Suhail R, a final year telecommunications engineering.