CHENNAI: Last year, when Vigneshwaran (name changed), a final year BCom student at a popular Arts and Science College in the city, submitted his project work on the state of Banking sector equities in the stock market in the fifth semester, his Head of the Department was quite impressed with the clarity of research and decided to award him high marks. However, when the external examiner, who came for the mandatory Viva Voce, scrutinised his work, he found that a major portion of the material had been plagiarised from a popular financial website, which forced him to refer the project to higher officials.Though Vigneshwaran escaped with a warning, he was forced to take up the project work as arrears in the last semester, jeopardising his chances of getting campus placement.Officials at the Madras University, as well as those in the individual colleges, now say that such incidents of plagiarism in project works have become so rampant among students that it was now threatening the very idea behind bringing the concept into the graduate studies.A top official at the University said that when the varsity discussed prospective methods that could be used for encouraging research among arts and science students years ago, it was decided to include a mandatory project work in the final year so that such experience could make the students more employable when they appeared for campus recruitment. The students were expected to choose a topic of research where there was scope for collecting primary data and arrive at their own inference in the dissertation based on the field work.However, the official said that in the last three years, the University had been receiving a number of complaints, formally and informally, from committed professors about how projects had become a mere ritual as most students just downloaded material from the Internet and put it into their dissertation even without proper attribution.“This is just like sitting in an exam hall and copying from the person in the front bench,” he said, adding that most students showed total disregard for the bibliography that should be attached at the end of every project.According to Vaageesan, Head of Department of Banking Management at the New College, most of the students who indulged in this sort of plagiarism were not aware of the seriousness or the consequences of what they were doing. He said that project works were being seen as more of a mark generator, where one improved one’s overall percentages without putting in much effort, and suggested that it should be made optional so that only those who were really interested took it up. Also, contrary to expectations, most of the topics chosen by students involved collection of only secondary data, thereby increasing the scope for plagiarism, he said.Manikandan, Head of the Department of Accounting and Finance at the RKM Vivekananda College, says that when the first draft is made, at least “seven out of ten” projects have material that is unattributed and copied from the Internet.“This is why, colleges in the city, such as ours, are now moving towards an internship-based project work format where the student is expected to take up internship and base his project on what he learnt there,” he said, adding that one cannot expect too much from students at the graduate level and the concept was just to acquaint them with tools of research. Also, the nexus between colleges, when it came to the conduct of Viva Voce, sends out a wrong signal to the students.A Head of Department at the Loyola College, on condition of anonymity, said most professors, who went to other colleges as external examiners, knew each other well and would not like to offend the other by pulling up students. “Also, the fear that the same person could come as external examiner for our department and could pull up some of our students ensures that many such blatant malpractices go unpunished,” he says.
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