Plagiarism

Well I've been here a week and a half, I now have my own mobile, bike and a fish. My fish is called Lance (蓝色 lan se = blue coloured） because he is electric blue. Yes, it is not a great name, but it makes me feel that my Mandarin is getting better so he will have to tough it out. He cost a pricy 9 yuan (80p).

I feel a little underqualified for my job, but also honoured by the trust that has been placed on me. For the modules that I teach, I write the syllabus, I write and mark the exams and I create the mark scheme. There is no set template to follow, it is all up to me. In some ways this is great, very different from the nannying approach that would be taken back home. For those of you who have argued with me about trust versus accountability in the past, well this is the sort of trust that I like (in theory). In reality, hmm we will see. At the end of the semester, the bottom 5% of teachers by student feedback are "terminated".

Life here often contrasts strongly (or subtly) with Western life, daily I find myself in situations which make me think again about things that I have taken for granted. This is difficult for me to explain clearly, but one topic where I have noticed a big difference in mentality here is plagiarism.

In the first teachers' orientation meeting, one of the returning teachers brought up plagiarism. He said very bluntly in front of all the Chinese staff that we would have to be strict with our students and explain again and again that it was not acceptable, otherwise we would get 50 essays cut and pasted from the internet. Not to boast, but this is a top university in China, where students have worked day and night to gain their place. Hence my initial reaction was that this view was rather insulting to the students, hardly crediting them with the hard working attitude that is famous here. To me, plagiarism is lazy, a quick and half-hearted solution to needing to get an assignment done. Speaking from experience, it generally ends in a pretty shoddy piece of work that you struggle to explain, because you don't really understand what you have "written". What followed surprised me. Chinese people rarely take any direct insult well (understandeably) and I expected the Chinese staff to defend their students from this sleight. Instead, they disagreed that a strict stance should be taken on plagiarism. They cited the example of a student who had been in trouble last year for three counts of plagiarism in work that counted towards his degree. The department had then given him another chance. Where was the cutthroat sink or swim attitude? This did not parallel the strict University rules on punctuality or a variety of other topics. Why so lax here? The more I have poked and prodded behind the scenes, the more obvious the answer has become. Plagiarism is everwhere. Research papers and books written by well respected professors here contain large chunks of plagiarism. People do not attempt to hide their plagiarism, because it is not shameful. In a world where everything has a single correct answer and the education system favours wrote learning, the best answer to a question is likely to be the one that has already been written, not something that you come up with off the top of your head.

The final thing that caused the penny to drop was a new piece of research that is being done here. Whether I'm meant to know this I'm not sure. A huge and well funded new research group has been formed to create a system to rival Google. The aim is a huge library of data which allows you to write essays, research and create new music. You can type in the first line of your poem etc. and the system will search for the most appropriate second line using the database of all existing media. It will then give a % rating to its closest match. Hence from your first line of music, the system will create the optimum piece that possibly could be made.

So how shall I go plan the daunting syllabi for my lessons? Well, there is a cheap photocopying shop near my office..