Plagiarism in the classroom.

I once taught at a tertiary institution in Singapore which shall remain nameless, given the topic in hand.

One day, after my lecture, a Chinese mainland student came to me with a rather earnest expression on his face. He presented me with a bundle of printed sheets, clearly taken off the internet. They were of an academic paper.

"Can you help me?" he began, clearly under some sort of pressure to get something done.

"How?" I asked, wondering where this was leading.

"Can you help me write my thesis?", he said, thrusting the academic paper towards me.

I felt most uncomfortable, at once - but didn't want to be abrupt.

I looked at the paper. It was not written by the student who had given it to me. It was a very complex academic paper written by someone who did not know the meaning of clarity. I could barely understand a word of it on first glance - and I was a native speaker of English accustomed to academic papers. It was the kind of paper that required very careful consideration to extract any meaning from it at all. It had been written by someone gifted in abstruseness but utterly ungifted as a writer.

"What do you want me to do?"

"Can you rewrite this for me?" He asked, without any consciousness that he shouldn't be doing so, pointing at the heavy paper in my hands.

"So...", I began slowly, as the enormity of the academic crime he wanted to involve me in, came to be understood by me, "You want me to write your thesis for you..."

He nodded, again unaware that what he had asked was wrong.

"And you want me to do so by taking all the ideas from this paper?"

Again, he nodded, unaware of the dishonesty of his request.

"No." I said, to his evident surprise and apparent anger. "Why don't you write it yourself?"

He was most put out. The notion that I, his teacher, would actually refuse to help him cheat his way to a degree was seemingly quite beyond him. He seemed shocked, angry, disappointed and speechless all at once.

What made his attempted crime all the worse was that he was completely incapable of understanding the paper he had decided to plagiarize. It was most definitely beyond him - yet he wanted to borrow its erudition for his own advancement. His English was decidedly dodgy - almost as bad as his morality. Yet, he had identified it as being just the material he needed to secure him his degree.

I don't know whether he managed to get any staff member to help him plagiarize a paper for his thesis. Perhaps he thought that I, being a foreigner, would be an easy mark, not being directly involved in the everyday issues of the College, in Singapore. Perhaps he asked other expats and found one who eventually obliged. All I know is that there was no way he was good enough to write a dissertation in English, at all, ever, by himself.

He never came to me again with such a request.

The incident, however, made me wonder how common plagiarism is, in Singapore. Is it widespread? Are hundreds or thousands of students "earning" degrees on the back of plagiarism? Is academic dishonesty rife in Singapore's educational institutions?

I do not have an answer. However, the very boldness with which that young man from China approached me made me think that he thought it a normal thing to do. He seemed almost to think it was his right to get me to help him win his degree by such unfair means.

Perhaps it is not a Singaporean problem, but a problem of the Chinese mainlanders who come here. If that is the case, then Singapore's educational institutions need to be alert to this possibility lest they end up handing out qualifications to the most unqualified people of all: cheats and plagiarists.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind)