Brno, Day 2

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Just got back from a long afternoon and evening of a social program that included a lot of history of the region. Here is a short list of the talks that I heard today at the plagiarism conference in Brno:

• The conference began today with a keynote speach from Calin Rus from the Intercultural Institute of Timisoara, Romania. He spoke about "Competences for Democratic Culture Model" that the Council of Europe is proposing for setting out the values, attitudes, skills, knowledge, and cultural understanding that should be the basis for education in countries that are members of the Council of Europe. In a way this boils down to showing respect to people you fundamentally disagree with. Rus linked intercultural competencies to a culture of academic integrity. This was widely acclaimed as being a good description of the way forward towards a "whole school" approach to education.
• Phil Newton from Swansea University then gave a rousing keynote on dealing with contract cheating. He referred us to the Australian site on the topic, cheatingandassessment. He walked us through the current business of ordering and selling bespoke essays that is part of the "gig-economy." He noted that contract cheating is big, cheap, quick, versatile, and established, so we have to learn to deal with it. We can't eradicate it, but we can make it harder to get away with. Setting short turnaround times is not a solution. He proposes ALE, not the beer, but Assessment design, Law and Education. Included in the education must be the educators. His group looked at 20 books on teacher education and found that only 12 of them even used the word "plagiarism", and none contained even the words "academic integrity," We need to engage, educate, and understand our students and design assissments to limit the influence of contract cheating. We need to focus on what students can do (i.e. demonstrate in a viva/oral exam), use portfolios and personal & specific assessments. He notes that the ghostwriter market is legal at the moment, but we should consider how to perhaps make it illegal. During the discussion it was noted that many academics are living in precarious situations and may be driven to work as ghostwriters.
• Ali Tahmazov & Cristina Costinius, from the text-matching software company Strike Plagiarism, spoke of the role of politics in academic plagiarism. They cautioned about countries trying to have their own software programmed just for their particular country. There is a limited use for one-size-fits-all solutions.
• Irene Glendinning, Dita Dlabolová, and Dana Linkeshová spoke about exploring issues challenging academic integrity in South East Europe. They obtained funding from the Council of Europe for a project SEEPPAI in which they interviewed students and teachers in Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and Serbia. They used the same instruments as the EU-Erasmus-funded IPPHEAE project, and thus could compare the results with the results of the EU countries (there are 50 countries in the Council of Europe). The results are published on the SEEPPAI web page. When asked if there was any reaction from the respective governments, a member of the audience noted that Montenegro is currently purchasing a country-wide licence for test-matching software.
• Gábor Király from the Budapest Business School in Hungary spoke about comparing lecturers’ and students’ understanding of student cheating. I was unable to watch the presentation, as the use of Prezi unfortunately caused me to suffer an acute case of vertigo. 
• Salim Razı, from the Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University in Turkey (and who will be organizing the plagiarism conference in 2018) presented the Turkish situation with respect to policies for plagiarism and academic integrity. His goal is to set and enforce nationwide, consistent and standard sanctions for plagiarism. He notes that just because there are no investigations by an ethics board, this does not mean that there is no plagiarism. It is just being dealt with on another level. He called for plagiarism awareness training to begin as early as possible.
• Jonathan Kasler, Tel Hai College, Israel, conducted an interesting survey using Don McCabe's self-reporting questionnaire on cheating. He found significant differences between the Hebrew- and the Arabic-speaking students at his school. A good debate ensued as to whether this was due to cultural differences, or to the L2 problem, that is, the Arabic-speaking students are not working in their mother language.
• Emilia Sercan, an assistant professor for journalism at the University of Bucharest, Romania and an investigative journalist, reported on plagiarism in PhD theses awarded just at military universities in Romania. That alone was hair-raising enough. She has, working alone, documented 15 cases of blatent plagiarism in doctoral dissertations in the past two years. The prime minister, Victor Ponta, was involved in a long, drawn-out plagiarism scandal involving his PhD that eventually ended in him asking for his doctorate to be withdrawn. There were so many cases that involved high-ranking politicans, she was only able to briefly present a few. The political reaction has been to restrict public access to doctoral dissertations.
• The moning session ended with Chloe Walker from the University of Oxford, UK, presenting a working paper on the Nairobi Shadow Academy. In Kenya there is a very large group of so-called "academic writers" that write bespoke essays in English. She has managed to contact many such writers and has had 220 answer a written survey. She interviewed 29 in a semi-structured manner and had in-depth interviews with 4 writers. She also did some first-person ethnography, pretending for two weeks to be a potential writer for one of the agencies. She is looking at, among other things, the motivations of the writers. For most, it is the money, although some only get paid 3-4$ per page, while others can earn 25-30 $/page. It is a career that can be done from home and is very flexible. One writer defended his work with: "If I don't stock cigarettes in my shop, that won't keep people from smoking." She closed with the question as to how it is possible for a 2nd year medical student in Kenya to write a graduate-level philosophy paper of passable quality for a German university, having had no prior training, never attending a lecture, and having never read a philosophy text in his life. I noted that the reason is probably that the paper was not even read by the grader. I look forward to reading her dissertation when she has it published.

So, those were the talks I managed to visit today, more coming up on Day 3, the final day.