Is this Academic Bribery?

One unique feature of the continuous assessment regime in higher education is to evaluate students not solely through their performance in the final exam, but also through other evaluation indicators throughout the course. Typically, the final exam will comprises of 30-70 percent of the final grade, while the remaining percentage are awarded to the students in the form of continuous assessment.

The common evaluation methods used as continuous assessment are certain percentages of the final grade to be allocated for the mid-term exams, tutorial exercises and assignments. However, in most cases, students' attendance will also be given a small percentage, such as 5 or 10 percent. In Malaysian universities, such practice of awarding a certain percentage for students' attendance is very common.

This is where the controversy begins. Is awarding students solely for their attendance a form of academic bribery?

The argument that supports for such allocation argues that students need to be incentivise to attend lectures and tutorials. Furthermore, it was also argued that with such incentive, students will come to lectures and tutorials more prepared and, lecturers are assured of an audience.

On the other hand, critics argue that by awarding students solely for their attendance is a form of bribery that helps student to score higher marks, without any contribution to the intellectual development of the students. (For more arguments, read report).

Is this a form of academic bribery? A point worth pondering.

This post is also available in The Malaysian Education Debate

Plagiarism

Malaysian academics were once again in the news for the wrong reason. Two lecturers were caught plagiarising materials from the Internet to produce a guide book. The punishments for their action include a stern warning that would be included in their service records and they have to return any royalty received for the book. So far, only a politician, who was formerly a professor, has called for the lecturers to be sacked, citing that "plagiarism is the most serious crime in a university".

What exactly is plagiarism? It is defined as a practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own. More specifically, plagiarism within academia is considered academic dishonesty or academic fraud. No doubt, plagiarism is a serious crime, but what is surprising with this incident was the lack of response from fellow academicians in the country and the public in general.

Is the lack of response due to the fact that such act is common?

From my own experience studying in a Malaysian public university, plagiarism or "partial-plagiarism" is quite a common phenomena. I remembered a core course in my second-year, where the lecturer, a very senior academic and held influential position in the department, "suggests" that all students in the course to purchase the course textbook, which was in Malay. The price of the book was RM10, but was "photocopied" and bind into a book form. Upon reading the book, readers will realise that all diagrams and figures in the book was "copy-and-paste", as the diagrams are worded in English, while the description and the texts are in Malay. Out of curiosity, a fellow coursemate began to search all textbooks and found the original version. When compared, it was obvious that every sentence of the Malay textbook was "literarily" translated and the diagrams and figures were "copy-and-paste" directly from the English version. The "author" to the Malay textbook is the lecturer and no acknowledgement whatsoever could be found that indicate that the Malay textbook was translated or cited from the English textbook.

Is that not plagiarism? Sadly, this is just one of the many incidents that I came across.

On the other hand, as an undergraduate student, I have to admit that we were not given any training to avoid plagiarism, or simply informed what is it all about. There was only one module that taught us how to cite references and perfectly list the references in the bibliography. However, the essence of citation and how to avoid plagiarism remains much a mystery.

How I came to know about plagiarism? I was privilege to have a lecturer, who failed one of my assignments, but later, explained what went wrong and taught me the essence of plagiarism and what it meant by citation and references. If not for the "education" of this lecturer, I might have graduated with a university degree without any hint of what plagiarism is all about.

Clearly, as a way to tackle plagiarism, proper education needs to be given to the students, teaching them what exactly is plagiarism and how to avoid it. On the other hand, strict and stern action is needed to punish those who knows, but yet, plagiarise. After all, plagiarism is a "criminal" act in the academia, very much alike stealing as a criminal act in the society.

This post is also available in The Malaysian Education Debate

The Making of "Diploma Disease"

The economy is in recession. As part of the stimulus package, tuition fees and research grants were offered to postgraduate students to pursue a PhD or Master's programme locally. Clearly, a strong push factor for graduates to pursue a postgraduate degree, at virtually zero monetary cost. The only cost is probably the opportunity cost of not working in the labour market.

On the other hand, among the many key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess and evaluate academic staffs in public universities, one of the KPI is the number of postgraduate students supervised. Such a KPI provides the necessary incentive for academic staffs to accept as many as possible postgraduate students. For the graduates, this is an indirect pull factor.

Along with the problem of graduate unemployment, these are perfect ingredients for the making of "Diploma Disease". Such phenomenon happens when the number of holders for a qualification increases, and thus, reduces the value of the qualification as an indicator of one's academic ability. As a result, there will be an increasing demand for higher levels of qualification.

We might need to ask that with these developments, will it happen that one day, Bachelor degrees are worthless in Malaysia, and the necessary university qualification is the Ph.D. We certainly hope the answer is no, but this is highly and likely.

This post is also available in The Malaysian Education Debate