Gary Pavela remembers being surprised by the defiant reaction of a visiting student from China whom he confronted over a clear-cut incident of plagiarism. “In my culture we view it as honouring someone to use their words,” said the student side-stepping the question of omission of attribution.
In a study, the University of Windsor in the Canadian province of Ontario tracked how many foreign students are being cited for academic dishonesty compared with their Canadian classmates. It found that one in 53 international students had been charged, versus one in 1,122 Canadians.
Even that, says Danielle Istl, Windsor’s academic integrity officer, “is only the tip of the iceberg. We don’t know how much goes on behind the scenes.” Most international students who wound up in the disciplinary process were accused of plagiarism, she adds. “To me, it isn’t that surprising because you have students whose first language isn’t English and they may struggle writing papers in English,” says Istl. However, other studies have found that the most common offence perpetrated by foreign students is cheating in examinations.
While administrators are hesitant to generalise about what may be driving students from abroad to cheat, they acknowledge that cultural differences play a major role. Twenty percent of international students in the US and Canada come from China (up 30 percent on last year) and 15 percent are from India, the largest groups of foreign students in the country. Experienced administrators suggest this has a lot to do with the rise in cheating.
In some countries — China and India included — “the climate for academic integrity is not strong”, says Pavela, a lawyer by training. “It is not simply an issue of the deficiencies of students, but includes faculty who cut corners or who do not share any more of a commitment to academic integrity than students,” he adds. Cheating for such students, he says, “is a survival mechanism. They are part of cultures where you have to do what you have to do.”
Compounding this is the pressure heaped on Chinese and Indian students by relatives and sponsors. “Those pressures include the potential embarrassment of having to go home (having not) succeeded here,” says Don McCabe, professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School and founding president of the Center for Academic Integrity.
But Prof. McCabe adds that US and Canadian universities have to take their share of the blame, too. “It’s the fault of the institutions in the sense that they aggressively recruit these students and don’t adequately orient them in different traditions of academic integrity,” he argues.
Excerpted from Times Higher Education