Cleaning up my browser tabs

The second Corona semester has now come to an end and I seem to have about 200 tabs open in various browsers. Some of the tabs concern interesting plagiarism and academic integrity questions, so here's just a brief list:

• The Minister for Education and Science in the Ukraine was being investigated for plagiarism (German) in his doctoral disseration as of July 2020. He is apparently also the rector of the university of technology in Tschernihi.
• The HEADT Centre at Humboldt University, Berlin has a series of recorded seminars on plagiarism, image manipulation, authorship, and content ownership, sponsored by Elsevier. 
• An arXiv preprint "Forms of Plagiarism in Digital Mathematical Libraries" of a conference presentation at the Intelligent Computer Mathematics - 12th International Conference, CICM 2019, Prague, Czech Republic, July 8-12, 2019
• Michael V. Dougherty published a book in 2020 on "Disguised Academic Plagiarism - A Typology and Case Studies for Researcher and Editors". (Conflict of interest: I reviewed this book for Springer)
• There was quite a spat over the diploma thesis and dissertation of an Austrian minister who stepped down over the incident. This led to many publications around the topic, for example one about degree mills at Der Standard (in German).
• Simone Belli (Spain), Cristian López Raventós (Mexico), and Teresa Guarda (Ecuador) published a paper "Plagiarism Detection in the Classroom: Honesty and Trust Through the Urkund and Turnitin Software" in the Proceedings of ICITS 2020. Of course, I find it very problematic to be using the numbers returned by Turnitin and Urkund as the basis of judging anything. The numbers are meaningless and do NOT give a percentage of plagiarism but an indication of text similarity. They are NOT the same thing. They write: "Thanks to these programs, teachers have a powerful tool to assess the level of honesty of students. [...] Thanks to this tool, the teacher can easily justify a bad grade that shows the percentage of plagiarism in the work presented by the student. At the same time, it saves time spent reviewing a text that is not evaluable due to its illegitimate origin." This is wrong on so many levels, I will be talking about this on March 24, 2020, at the conference sponsered by the Office of Research Integrity.
  
• My university, HTW Berlin, now has ethical guidelines for research! (in German)
• A court in Berlin has decided that a Berlin university was correct in exmatriculating a student for plagiarism. Berlin universities have a policy of "two strikes and you are out", if a student is found plagiarizing twice, they are exmatriculated. In this case, the student was found to be plagiarizing once in his Bachelor's program and once in his Master's program. He felt that he should be "allowed" on plagiarism in each program, the university insisted that the programs are consecutive, and thus he is out. Need I mention that the student was studying .... ethics and philosophy?
  

Austrian Minister Resigns in Plagiarism Scandal

The Austrian Minister of Labor, Family and Youth, Christine Aschbacher, resigned January 9, 2021 in the wake of a plagiarism scandal.

There was already much talk about problems in her Master's Thesis (plagiatsgutachten.com, in German). It was then found that her freshly minted (2020) doctoral dissertation contained not only the kind of nonsense a machine translation is capable of producing, but also contained a good bit of plagiarism. The Austrian press had a field day on January 9, Krone, Kurier, and Der Standard each had big articles in print, which apparently led to her stepping down.

The online versions of the various media report about her resignation: Oe24, Kurier, ORF, Der Standard. The Guardian has also reported on it in English. The minister denies having plagiarized, stating that she did the work "nach bestem Wissen und Gewissen" (using my best knowledge and conscience), a statement previously made by the German Family Minister Franziska Giffey during the plagiarism scandal surrounding her doctoral thesis, that is still brewing in Berlin.

Aschbacher's dissertation was not submitted to an Austrian university, as one might expect, but to the Technical University Bratislava (Slovenská technická univerzita), in nearby Slovakia.

Why Slovakia? Well, first of all, they accept not only theses in Slovakian, but also in English and German. Then there was a small matter of an Austrian company "helping" people obtain doctoral dissertations in Slovakia (see the series of articles in the blog CausaSchavan from 2016, Hütchenspiele: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7, in German). And of course the important detail that a doctoral degree granted in Slovakia can't be rescinded. Ever. No matter what. That has apparently changed from January 1, 2021.

VroniPlag Wiki had a look at a few doctoral dissertations from Bratislava universities in 2016, 2018, and 2020 and found quite a bit of plagiarism lurking there, including another member of the 100 % Club, Jul. 

According to Der Standard, the doctoral thesis of Aschbacher was examined by the Slovakian state plagiarism detection system and it only found 1.5 % plagiarism. Turnitin, according to Stefan Weber, the author of Plagiatsgutachten, returned 21 %. But since software cannot detect translation plagiarism, one just cannot measure the "amount" of plagiarism in a document. It is only possible to find text that matches text stored in the databases the software is able to access.

If you understand German (well, Austrian German), you might find the "reading" of a passage from the dissertation by Hons Petutschnig amusing: https://twitter.com/PetutschnigHons/status/1347934502664986625.

Update: My mistake, I mixed up the Slovenian system and the Slovak system. I have corrected the text, the test can be found here (Foltýnek, T., Dlabolová, D., Anohina-Naumeca, A. et al.  Testing of support tools for plagiarism detection  Int J Educ Technol High Educ 17, 46 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-020-00192-4). 

 

 

 

News about VroniPlag Wiki cases

A few notes on current and past VroniPlag Wiki cases:

• Margarita Mathiopoulos (VPW case Mm, extensive documentation to be found at MMDoku) submitted her dissertation in political science in 1986 to the University of Bonn. In 1989 an intensive public discussion (started by Spiegel) arose about plagiarism in the thesis, but the university decided after an investigation not to rescind the doctorate. In 2011, VroniPlag Wiki looked into the dissertation again and found much more plagiarism. The university re-opened the investigation and rescinded the doctorate in 2012. Mathiopoulos took the university to court and lost. No appeals were permitted, but she appealed against there not being a chance of an appeal. According to Spiegel Online, she has won that case, so now an appeal is permitted to determine if the VroniPlag Wiki documentation contains new material. If that is the case, the university can indeed withdraw the doctorate after the second examination. If the documentation is considered to be more of the same that was evaluated the first time, then the university will be bound by its decision at that time. Since the appeals are still running, Mathiopoulos can continue to use her doctoral degree and remains appointed as an honorary professor at the University of Potsdam and the Technical University of Braunschweig.
• Sophie Koch (VPW case Ssk) submitted a dissertation in pedagogy to the University of Düsseldorf in 2011. This is the same department to which former German education minister Annette Schavan had submitted her dissertation in 1980. Suspicions of plagiarism were raised in the VroniPlag Wiki forum in 2012, and the documentation began. And stagnated. There were plenty of other cases around. Eventually, though, it was decided to make the case known, and the university was informed. Surprisingly, the university library notes that the doctoral degree was already rescinded in February. This means that someone else had already informed the university and they they had been investigating it for some time.
  So who is Sophie Koch? If you read German, the blog Erbloggtes has an amusing account. The so-called "popular press" has been having a field day, as Sophie Koch is a popular and well-known TV personality with her own show on a German commercial television channel giving advice to single mothers and teenagers. The number of mistakes in the reporting, even by the so-called serious press, is highly amusing. 
• It is sad, however, to see that the press only seems to report on celebrities or particularly problematic cases (100 % of the pages plagiarized). Cases in which a dissertation in law that was rejected from a German university for plagiarism was then submitted with a few modifications to the Austrian University of Innsbruck and accepted there (VPW case Rm) or a 61-page dissertation in medicine at the University of Bonn that includes 11 pages verbatim and without reference from the Wikipedia and even more from various textbooks and papers (VPW case Go) get little press coverage, if at all. There are currently 143 cases documented on the site, 75 alone in medicine and dental medicine. There is plagiarism from papers by the doctoral advisor, there are habilitations that share much text with dissertations prepared under the tutelage of the same post-doc and it is impossible to tell who copied from whom or if they wrote it together and "forgot" to mention it. Some lift bits and pieces from other theses at the same university, some prepare a collage of papers from other universities, some use the Wikipedia without reference rather copiously. We have seen someone recycle his own doctorate in medicine for part of his second doctorate, this time in theology (VPW case Jpm). What we can determine is that the system is failing to detect and sanction plagiarism at all levels. The big question is: how do we do something about it?

Austrian term papers clog plagiarism detection system

The Austrian online newspaper derStandard.at reports on a bit of problem with their new high school term paper submission system for the school leaving certificates matura. Pupils in Austria are now expected to submit a 40,000 to 60,000 character long term paper (vorwissenschaftliche Arbeit) by the middle of their last year of school. The paper will be graded by teachers and the students must give a presentation on their work.

Of course, since Austria is well aware that there is a plagiarism problem, at least as far as pupils and students are concerned [not so much for doctoral dissertations, but that is another blog post], the term papers must be checked for plagiarism by a so-called plagiarism detection system.

The due date 2015 is Friday, February 13. Surprise, many students have waited until the last minute, and the system is throwing errors that appear to point to the system being swamped. Apparently, they did not also reckon with such large files as are being uploaded. The server operator noted that they were expecting the files to be around 1 MB, instead they were getting 60 MB large files.

Not to fear - there is a Plan B in action: the pupils can submit a printed version at their schools in order to keep the deadline. Or, as one teacher noted in a comment, submit at 5 a.m. The server runs well at that time of the night.

2013 there were almost 44,000 pupils granted their diplomas in Austria. Teachers will now, in addition to grading these papers, have to wade through the results of the plagiarism-detection software, although they also generate false positives as well as false negatives, thus not determining plagiarism but giving some ideas as to where perhaps there could be some plagiarism. Even assuming that a teacher only spends an average of 10 minutes per paper interpreting the results (and this is generous, as the reports are not easy to read and the numbers reported can be quite misleading), this means a minimum of 7-8000 extra hours of work nationwide, but probably tenfold that.

If the pupils are anything like the ones I see in the first semester, they love to take pictures they found on the Internet to spice up their texts - they are much more visually oriented than the older generations. The software will certainly not be able to identify pictures that are not used according to license, so the teachers will also need to use Google's image search or a system such as TinEye to look for the potential sources, increasing the amount of time needed for grading.

Maybe the idea of a term paper submitted centrally needs to be rethought? Of course, they have to learn how to do research and to write about a topic. But we need to be thinking about how to develop methods of assessment that are plagiarism-proof, instead of adding more broken software to a broken system.

Austrian Doctorates Disappeared?

There was a bit of a flurry in Austria the middle of February when it appeared that the doctoral titles the Austrians are so enamored of had been deleted from the official government registers. This was front page news:

https://twitter.com/joseflentsch/status/433850871693451264/photo/1

The article in Heute reports that people who had had their doctoral titles entered into the official database before 2007 needed to show their certificate at the registration office again if they wanted to keep using the title. According to the Standard, however, the ministry states that there was no data deleted. Instead, the doctoral title had been recorded in a free-text field and now they had a specific field for titles. Apparently, some communities made mistakes when transferring the data.

Austrians with doctoral titles can now begin breathing again.

Austrian Plagiarism

The University of Innsbruck has been in the news recently in Germany at least because of two cases of plagiarism in law doctorates.

The first is the news that Dominic Stoiber, the son of Bavarian politician Edmund Stoiber and sister of Veronica S. (the "Vroni" of VroniPlag Wiki) is allowed to keep his doctorate. Reports are available in German from Spiegel Online, Abendzeitung München, Münchener Merkur (no link, as they support the LSR).

He submitted a thesis in 2010 called "Die Föderalismusreform I der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Beschreibung und Bewertung der Reform und eine Analyse der Bewährung in der Praxis anhand des Nichtraucherschutzes" to the University of Innsbruck, Austria, about some political work his father did.

Spiegel Online quotes the university senate chair Ivo Hajnal as stating that the proceedings focused on the term Wesentlichkeit (fundamentality). According to the Austrian rules the university examiners can only assume that fraudulent merits have been obtained when

 "[..] in Täuschungsabsicht wesentliche Teile der Arbeit ohne entsprechende Hinweise abgeschrieben worden sind. Besagte Wesentlichkeit ist dann anzunehmen, wenn bei objektiver Betrachtung der Verfasser der Arbeit davon ausgehen musste, dass bei entsprechenden Quellenhinweisen die Arbeit nicht positiv oder zumindest weniger günstig beurteilt worden wäre, entsprechende Quellenhinweise also zu einem ungünstigeren Ergebnis (sprich: einer schlechteren Note) geführt hätten". [... with the intent to defraud fundamental parts of the thesis were copied without the necessary references. This fundamentality is given when the author of the thesis can assume that haven given correct references, under an objective examination the thesis would have been graded failed or given a worse grade. This means that if the references would have been given, a worse grade would have been assigned. -- dww]

That means that he would only have been considered a fraud if he would have received a worse grade by giving proper references. And since he would have received the same grade (!) even if the references would have been given, this is not fraud.

The Abendzeitung München reports that an Austrian newspaper, Tiroler Tageszeitung,  asked the Austrian plagiarism expert Stefan Weber to investigate the 287 page thesis. He documented a number of minor transgressions and a copy of a term paper written by a student in the third semester 15 years previously. The university then began investigations, according to § 89 UnivG.

The university has announced that Stoiber will be keeping his degree and for reasons of privacy and secrecy will not elaborate on their reasoning.

The second case is VroniPlag Wiki case #42. This law thesis was being prepared at the HU Berlin, when the doctoral advisor refused to continue mentoring the student. The thesis was a plagiarism of an old textbook. According to the advisor, when the student requested to just be given a lesser (but passing) grade, the advisor threw him out. One year later he submitted a thesis on the same subject to the University of Innsbruck, where it was accepted.

The University of Innsbruck was informed of the plagiarism when the case was publicly named - as well as the university of applied sciences at which the author currently is teaching. They at first did not even acknowledge that they had been informed, it took a number of increasingly intensive letters to get them to assent to opening an investigation.

A journalist for Zeit Online just tried to contact both the universities in question. Innsbruck pretty much told him that they had no intention of telling anyone what the results of the investigation is. The Heilbronn college stated that they are waiting on the decision from Innsbruck before doing anything, although their own ethics policy would permit them to start an own investigation. Seeing as how the documentation is public - and with 68 % of the pages tainted, extensive - it is not clear why they are not taking action. Since Innsbruck seems to be playing secrecy games and it is not clear that they will be informed as to how the case turns out, this is rather a modern-day version of Waiting for Godot.

I find it troubling that questions of academic integrity are not openly discussed, but only decided behind closed doors. Reading the comments section on these articles is even more shocking. A student from Heilbronn writes in the comments section that she does not understand why

"[... ] diese völlig belanglose Plagiatsaffäre eines kleinen und bei seinen Studenten sehr beliebten FH-Profs an einer Provinz-Hochschule hier so breit getreten wird - anstatt sie zunächst einmal der eigentlich betroffenen Uni Innsbruck zur Klärung zu überlassen." [... this completely inconsequential plagiarism affair concerning a small and very beloved professor at an FH in a provincial college is being so widely discussed instead of waiting for the concerned University of Innsbruck to clear up the matter. -- dww]

This does, I suppose, make the German and Austrian situation crystal clear. There are far too many people in German and Austrian academia who do not understand what academic integrity is about and are completely unwilling to take action of any sort. Why don't the people who wrote decent theses in law at the University of Innsbruck get vocal? 

If at first you don't succeed....

VroniPlag Wiki case #42, is fascinating. It seems that this law thesis was submitted to the Humboldt University in Berlin in 2000.  There was so much plagiarism to be found that the submitter was strongly encouraged to withdraw the thesis, which he apparently did.

The next year, a new version of the thesis was submitted to the University of Innsbruck in Austria (after all, they do speak German there, too). There it was accepted without question. VroniPlag Wiki has currently documented plagiarism on over 20 % of the pages. One of the major sources is the standard textbook on English law. The other is a thesis on a very similar topic from 1969. Many of the argumentation chains used strangely do not address any of the law commentary or court decisions that took place since then, which is odd for a dissertation prepared at the turn of the century.

The author, as is usual, insists that he used footnotes. Of course he did, but it is not made clear that the entire argumentation was lifted with slight changes from the sources. The University of Innsbruck announced that it was looking into legal aspects regarding the Austrian blogger who called attention to the work published on VroniPlag Wiki, not the author of the dissertation, who is currently employed as a professor in Germany.

At least the Austrian press is jumping on this. It seems that cases are only promptly addressed when the glaring light of the press is shown into the dark cellars of academia. There is an interesting parallel to the year 1794 (!) in the Kaiserlicher Priviligierter Reichsanzeiger:

"Man macht oft sehr unwürdige Leute zu Doctoren und Licentiaten, besonders in den Rechten und in der Medicin. Die Facultisten, welche von dieser Schöpfung aus Nichts einige Einnahmen haben, entschuldigen sich damit, wenn man ihnen darüber Vorwürfe machen will; daß, wenn sie auch den unwissenden Candidaten hätten abweisen wollen, derselbe noch einige 30 andere Facultäten in Deutschland würde angetroffen haben, von welchen sich gewiß einige daraus würden eine Ehre und Freude gemacht haben, den Herrn Candidaten zu krönen"
(Often, quite dishonorable persons are made doctors and licentiates, especially in law and medicine. The faculties, that have income from this creation out of nothing, excuse themselves when faced with accusations with that statement that if they would send the candidates away, they would find another 30 faculties in Germany of which some would be pleased and honored to crown these candidates. [translation dww])

Kaiserlich privilegirter Reichs-Anzeiger, 2 Januar 1794, S. 8

Update: Translation, typos, link to source added

German politician's son loses doctorate, too.

The Bavarian daily newspaper Münchener Abendblatt reports that now also the son of the former Bavarian premier Edmund Stoiber has been stripped of his doctorate by the Austrian University of Innsbrück. Previously, one of his daughters -- whose nickname "Vroni" was the basis for the plagiarism documentation platform VroniPlag Wiki -- had also had her doctorate rescinded on the basis of plagiarism by the German University of Constance.

The detection of the plagiarism in the doctorate of the son was done by Stefan Weber, a private plagiarism investigator, on behalf of the Austrian newspaper Tiroler Tageblatt, the Münchener Abendblatt reports. The newspaper notes that Stoiber's son is contesting the rescinding of his doctorate in the courts. His sister also went to court, but the court confirmed the position of the university.

Self-Plagiarism

There has been quite a discussion on self-plagiarism in Germany the past few weeks, based mostly on a discussion about a paper that the current Minister of Education published 32 years ago parallel with her thesis that contains much identical material and neither refers to the other. I've been on the radio on the topic and there have been quite a number of articles published on the question.

There is an interesting legal article written by an Austrian law professor about the question of self-plagiarism: Gamper, Anna: Das so genannte „Selbstplagiat“ im Lichte des § 103 UG 2002 sowie der „guten wissenschaftlichen Praxis“. In: zfhr 8 (2009) 1, S. 2-10. DOI: 10.1007/s00741-008-0204-5

Conclusion (my translation)

A self-plagiarism is apparently only frowned upon in those cases, in which it is in essence identical to an original work, without referring to that work. [...] In such a case of sameness it cannot be the case that these are "new scientific findings [...]". 

(Wenn ein „Selbstplagiat“ verpönt ist, dann offenbar nur in Fällen, in denen eine damit im Wesentlichen idente Originalarbeit bereits veröffentlicht wurde, ohne dass auf diese gleichzeitig hingewiesen wird. [...] In einem solchen Fall der Identität liegen jedenfalls keine „neuen wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisse“ iSd § 103 Abs 3 Z 2 UG 2002 vor.)

Austrian association for academic integrity publishes report

The Austrian Association for Academic Integrity (OEAWI) has published a report on its activities in 2011. The number of cases reported has tripled, the report has a few details on some of the kinds of cases that went to resolution. They have links to the report and other documents at http://www.oeawi.at/de/downloads.html.

Keepers

There are now two cases of people accused of plagiarism who have been permitted to keep their doctorates, as determined by the respective universities.

• Johannes Hahn, University of Vienna
  The former Austrian Minister of Education and current Member of the European Parliamenthad been accused previously of having plagiarized his dissertation (a number of articles can be found at the blog Plagiatsgutachten). The University of Vienna reopened the case, hemmed and hawed, asked for expertises, and then decided that the thesis would have been unacceptable today, but they could not determine what "rules for quotations" were valid 25 years ago. Many people found this shocking, as pretty much the same rules for quotations have been in place for more than 25 years.
  Reports can be found at Die Presse - Spiegel Online - Official university statement
• Bernd Althusmann, University of Potsdam
  The current Minister of Education in Lower Saxony and chairman of the German national board of Ministers of Education (in Germany, education is the responsibility of the states, not the federal government) was accused of plagiarism in the newspaper Die Zeit in July. The University of Potsdam took the issue up and looked into the thesis. Everyone agrees that the thesis is pretty bad. Some even say that it should never have been accepted. But the problem is, the doctorate was granted, and the rules say that in order to rescind the doctorate, you have to prove that he knowingly cheated. Much of the plagiarism is of the sloppy kind that you normally throw in the face of a bachelor student and demand a rewrite. It appears that he was actually asked to rewrite one or two times, and then they gave up and gave him a rite on it, a grade meaning "go away and stay away from university, but you can put the letters in front of your name". The commission felt that they could not prove intention, just sloppiness, and so did not rescind his doctorate. There is a good discussion on the blog de plagio explaining the reasoning.

My problem, today, is that I caught a student plagiarizing three times. Okay,  I hadn't graded the lecture summaries for 2 weeks, so there were four half page reports for each student to grade. One student stole from the Wikipedia twice, and a tutorial once. The first Wikipedia one was easy, he forgot to remove the links to other Wikipedia articles. The second one he even had the word "Wikipedia" on the page, but didn't use quotation marks. The third one was stolen from a tutorial site, and easy to note, as in the middle of the second paragraph it said "In this tutorial....".

Now, if I apply the reasoning above or the reasoning zu Guttenberg uses, if the plagiarist is busy or does not know the rules, then it's not plagiarism.  Which pretty much means that we can pack in as teachers. How can we enforce tough plagiarism policies, when education leaders get let off the hook for sloppiness?

Austrian plagiarist gets another chance

The Austrian newspaper Tiroler Tageszeitung reports on the case of a scientist at the University of Innsbrück who received a doctorate in building materials science for a thesis which included plagiarized portions.

A German scientist was shocked to find an article in BetonWerk International reporting on the results of his own doctoral thesis, which he defended in 2001. He was not the author of this article, however, it was from the Austrian researcher.

He complained to the university, and the university did start an investigation. The surprising results: Yes, indeed, this is plagiarism. But the researcher - who appears to be working in the laboratory of the dean at the University of Innsbrück - gets to keep his doctorate if he submits a thesis within the next four months in which he corrects the "incorrect citations". Just a bit of carelessness with footnotes, it seems. The plagiarism was not "enough" for the doctorate to be revoked.

One wonders, given the current state of citation (un)culture in Austria, just how much needs to be plagiarized in order to warrant revocation. An other case in Germany, which has not yet hit the presses, involves a doctorate that is largely a word-for-word plagiarism of diploma-theses written under the tutelage of the "doctor". After 2 years of investigation, it seems the university is finally "considering" a revocation - and of course, the person so threatened is taking his university to court.

What has to happen in order for this system to change? We need proper mentoring of theses - the adviser must know the work well enough to know if it is a plagiarism or not. It must be clear at all levels that it is not acceptable to publish work done by dependent persons - or by third parties - under one's own name. And there must be effective punishments for people caught doing so, not just lashes with a wet noodle.

Any ideas?

Plagiarism in Austria

Stefan Weber, an Austrian media scholar, has been trying to fight plagiarism in Austria since he discovered his own doctoral thesis published in part by someone else in Germany. That case, at the University of Tübingen, ended up in the plagiarist losing his doctoral title (good, that - it was the department the current pope used to teach at, would have been a feeding frenzy for the press if they had not done the right thing).

Since then Weber has spent 1 1/2 years investigating theses in Austria (which are published online these days) finding, he says, many cases of plagiarism. He has tried to get publicity for this problem, as the universities play it down ("bad quoting", not plagiarism), and has used the tabloid press for this, they are always interested in a good row. This does not amuse the very conservative university administrations. They seem to prefer to ignore the problem and hope it goes away.

Weber writes that he is now giving up. He has been publically ridiculed for pointing a finger at the mess, people even suggesting that maybe *his* doctorate needs revoking for stirring up the waters, and called all sorts of names. Only the University of Vienna seems to have any sort of useful policy in place, he says, actually removing theses in dispute from the Internet until it is cleared up. The other schools try and ignore Weber, he accuses.

Mighty strange place, Austria.