When college students consider cheating on their jobs, it’s because they “think they’ll never be caught red-handed” and because it makes it easy to do so, according to a study conducted almost everywhere in the world, including in Québec .
“It is all the more worrying because the phenomenon of plagiarism is in the midst of a crisis due to the new technological tools that have appeared with the development of artificial intelligence,” says Newspaper Catherine Déri, postdoctoral student at the University of Quebec in Outaouais (UQO). His research is being presented this week as part of the Acfas (formerly the French Canadian Association for the Advancement of Sciences) conference taking place in Ottawa from May 13 to 17.
As part of an international study on academic plagiarism involving thirty universities in several countries in Europe and North America, his team collected responses from 978 professors and 3,697 baccalaureate students.
Too easy to copy and paste
The research focuses on incentives to commit plagiarism. In addition to the absence of fear of being caught (79.5% of respondents), it is the ‘lack of time’ (52.6%) and the fact that it is ‘easy to copy and paste the Internet’ (48 .3%) which most encourage plagiarism.
Catherine Déri is a postdoctoral student in educational sciences at the University of Quebec and Outaouais. She conducts research into plagiarism at universities.
Photo courtesy of Catherine Déri
“The accessibility of chatbots like ChatGPT has been making plagiarism much easier for about two years. Borrowing texts does not appear to be a problem for many students,” M continues.me Déri, specialist in educational sciences.
A colleague from UQO, Martine Peters, also suggested including conversation robots in the redefinition of plagiarism. Not to ban them, but to correctly cite their contribution to the texts. “We should not necessarily mention them as authors, but we should mention the abstracts in full transparency,” says Mme Deri.
Best training wishes
There is software to detect plagiarized texts, but they are not up to date because they lag behind the development of conversation robots, she adds.
Rather, the solution lies in educating teachers and students so that they are better prepared to prevent plagiarism.
“One element that often comes up is the lack of time, which leads to cutbacks, as they say. We have to work tomorrow and we have to do it quickly! We believe that better planning is necessary to prevent plagiarism under these circumstances,” she emphasizes.
A small consolation: the problem is not limited to the school system in Quebec. The seven-year international research project is only half way through, but there is a feeling that an entirely new approach to plagiarism will be needed to deal with the situation.
“I personally adjusted my evaluation methods during my courses to avoid being confronted with texts that had been copied from software,” she concludes.