Pedagogical Mockery and Plagiarism

The world is young and so are the spates of perfidy that continuously take birth in it. Man creates and man corrupts, whether the object under consideration be of a physical or an intellectual nature. The academic sector has long been the victim of an excruciating balk which blemishes the core of its very existence. Plagiarism is not only the act of stealing information but it is also the theft of credit that the plagiarizer receives, proving it to be a stimulus to an incessant chain of the benighted attaining the heights they desire while the devout remain indiscernible.

As all blessings come with a curse, the same can be said for the search engines that were primarily designed to make the internet surfer’s life easy, but unintentionally ameliorated the bounds of this plague, burgeoning it to almost every online institution in the world. In Pakistan, academic programs related to the field of computer and management sciences have been the de facto areas fervently infested with this Beelzebub.

It may be valid to presume that this art of copy-pasting and compiling made its way in the education system through the student body. The efforts of many private and some government institutions to curb with and eventually abate this dastardly transgression have been laudable. Ironically, most of these endeavors encircle the implementation of a single rule i.e. to penalize the student if a relevant infringement is identified, gauging the fact that the terms plagiarizer and student are considered synonymous, which renders the whole plan as coarse and inadequate. In order to stipulate comparatively effective anti-plagiarism policies, all relevant authorities need to realize that there are other surging participants in the system that also benefit from intellectual spoofs and thus actively contribute to the prevalence of a gradual decline in the quality of education. In particular, I’m talking about our respected teachers.

One can only imagine the repercussions associated to the illegitimacy of the people that are epitomized to spread knowledge. Unfortunately, the brunt can only be felt when the freshman starts working. Gone are the days when it was easy to find dedicated gurus that would amicably guide pupils to the dizzying heights of knowledge. The present era brings us face to face with educators that are solely concerned with the balance in their bank account with minimal concern towards ethics or the student’s future. Ranging in ages from 20 and above, these so called educationalists come late, reschedule classes at the eleventh hour, opt for a blatantly unruly number of courses to teach, let their biases feast on the students and worse i.e. plagiarize presentation and test material, while most of the times being pampered with unquestionable powers bestowed by the institutional administrations. The paucity of professionalism goes to such lengths that sometimes the examination material is neither created nor checked by these bogus incumbents. This is where the unscrupulous use of teacher assistants and office subordinates comes in.

Some might claim that it is foolish to reinvent. But when it is observed that the teacher makes the students give chapter wise presentations all semester, the question paper is dated 5 months back or accidentally contains the name of another institution where the instructor teaches or consists of the same MCQs provided in the teacher’s manual at www.prenhall.com with ditto sequence along with a hint hyperlink for each, it becomes pretty justified to question the teacher’s authenticity and intents.

"It’s all in the name of practicality", says Zain, a scholarship holder at a private university. "Ma’am says that theory is of less use in the real world, so our midterm was a question paper attached with xeroxed financial statements from random annual reports of real companies. The answers to the first two questions were indeterminable but she wouldn’t agree until another four of the class’s braniacs confronted her one after the other. Then she sat down and read the statements for about 10 minutes and made an announcement of a change in the paper. A complete hour, out of three, was wasted in the process, and we weren’t even given extra time,” he exclaims while making a grimace. “Later while doing a project, I found the same questions on the internet. That was more than enough to surmise her level of seriousness when it came to teaching,” he adds further.

“My HRM instructor proves that teaching is the easiest job”, asserts Sadia, a student at a government university. “You can do whatever you want and no one will inquire why. You don’t even have to teach as a matter of fact. Just drone out the slides made by the HR department of your organization, cut-paste matter from a book or the internet for the examination and you’re job is done. If you’re working on an MS thesis/Independent study, why worry, assign the class projects related to it and voila, life is heaven,” are her sarcastic remarks.

Surprisingly, students don’t report such acts (of plagiarism) to the administration. One explanation for this avoidance is the fear that the management would be impervious, the word would get out, and the teacher will get back at them, which to an extent is true but by far the main reason. Upon discovering these teacherly shenanigans, most of our generation starts dreaming the opportunity of getting an easy grade, and as they already are the uncrowned kings and queens of bootlegging, it doesn’t take much time for them to covertly shovel out the resources being utilized by their comparatively unskilled mentors. If it’s a question paper from another institute, they’ll contact the direct and indirect friends that study there. If it’s a test pasted from a website, they’ll download it to the last byte. So in the end its au revoir to studies and bonjour to the teacher’s plagiarized treasures.

For a bachelors or masters degree in the aforementioned fields, government universities charge 10-25 K annually while only a single course costs a whopping 6-15 K at a private institute. Furthermore, admissions are given on a merit basis i.e. pre-entry tests and interviews, for which competition gets tougher every year. From a student’s perspective, such large amounts of money and energy are not by any means spent to end up being taught by negligent individuals, forcing one to indulge and depend on mere self studies. If self study isn’t enough, students opt for other tactics. “Good grades can never be attained by working hard, it’s how smart one works,” claims Rizwan, a backbencher in his class. “We are treated as culprits and guinea pigs all the time. I don’t pay a hefty fee to be taught by fresh, inexperienced, lackadaisical graduates or curmudgeons who have a tendency to abuse their powers, be non-serious, discriminate, promote rote learning, inadvertently check papers and assignments, and what not. But its still happening. So cheating, plagiarizing, apple polishing etc are merely tools of survival in this unjust and demanding environment. If it wasn’t for them, my grades would’ve suffered big time,” he admits reluctantly.

Stories like these clearly demarcate the laxity in the teaching domain. If the future of this nation is in the hands of the young, it is an inevitable responsibility for the mainstays of wisdom to be continuously updated and dedicated to lead the way. If policies come hard on the students, they should be revamped to also come hard on the teachers, not only because of the universal rule of equality, but because upcoming generations depend on their guidance. Its high time for the watchdogs in the academic sector to stop blaming students for every crime and shift their undivided attention to the educator’s arena and inclemently cull such inept and sleazy individuals before they fabricate more of their kind, completely undermine their much respected profession and form a much widened eclipse over the nearly clogged light of quality education.