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VietNamNet Bridge – Many Vietnamese students now have to spend only half a day to write a thesis: they borrow the theses of the elder students, then “process” the theses by copying and pasting paragraphs to create theses of their own.
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“I’ll try to borrow soft copies from elder students and Autocad drawings. What I have to do is to edit the copies to create a thesis of my own,” MK said, adding that ½ of the students of his class write theses this way.
QH, a student of the HCM City University of Technology, said he has to spend more time than MK to write a thesis. H said he will have to borrow many theses from the students of the HCM City Industry University and HCM City University of Technical Education.
“I will have to edit the paragraphs, cut paragraphs and add more information,” he said. “No lecturer will discover that my thesis is made of copied paragraphs,” he said.
According to Tien phong, plagiarism has been occurring at every school. Some students even simply copy 100 percent of the theses of other students, while other students adjust some paragraphs and figures. Especially, some of them think that they should give wrong calculation answers, because they believe that only wrong answers can make lecturers believe that students write theses themselves”.
“Right answers for such complicated questions would raise doubts for lecturers,” a student said.
VL, a student of a university in HCM City, who has copied a thesis, said that while it takes other students many days to write theses, VL only had to spend half a day to have a thesis.
When asked why students have to copy theses, MK said that he cannot spend too much time on writing theses, because he has to spend time on other subjects. Meanwhile, QH, another student, said the lecturers, who guide the writing, only gave cursory advices about how to write theses, therefore, he has no other choice than copying other theses.
Dr Truong Thi To Oanh, a lecturer of Ton Duc Thang University, admitted that students copy theses. She said it is easy to discover the students who plagiarize theses by posing some questions. “If students write theses themselves, they will be able to answer questions,” she said.
However, according to Oanh, though lecturers know well that students copy theses, lecturers remain compliant when marking theses. She said lecturers, when marking a theses, also consider the attitudes of students to the works and the diligence of students.
Many reasons have been cited to explain why students copy theses. Analysts say students nowadays learn not to improve their knowledge, but to get high marks. Meanwhile, copying works allows them to get higher marks than writing theses themselves. Besides, many students are too lazy at learning and they do not have basic knowledge. Therefore, it would be easier for them to “steal knowledge” from others.
“Q”, a lecturer of the Hoa Sen University, said that she once read many theses which clearly showed the lack of serious preparations and creativeness. Many students were so careless that they even made simple mistakes in style and font.
“Sometimes I can see the paragraphs with strange style in theses, and then I could find the paragraphs by searching on Google,” she said.
The “thesis markets” in the areas of Ton That Tung and Bui Thi Xuan streets in HCM City are very bustling these days. When Tien phong’s reporters came to a photocopy shop and asked for the documents relating to finance and economics, the worker of the shop provided a list of documents, saying that the documents have been copied to disks. Buyers only have to pay 8000 dong for a disk with big capacity.
The officer said that the documents he sold were reliable and these were old theses, so they would be “safe”, because no lecturer would discover the copying.
Source: Tien phong
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