Japanese Prince found plagiarizing in prize essay

The Japanese newspaper Ashai Shimbun published an article on February 17, 2022, about plagiarism in an essay that Prince Hisahito, the second in line to the Japanese throne, wrote for school. The essay had been submitted to a contest and was awarded the second prize. The  Telegraph in the UK details the plagiarized portions a few days later. It appeared to be picked up in many UK outlets such as Royal Central. Today, April 13, 2022, the German Süddeutsche picked up the story. 

Strangely, he was allowed to keep the prize despite the plagiarism.

Germany's problem with academic integrity

This blog post at ICAI by Sebastian Burkholdt with a student perspective on academic integrity from a German student in the USA just nails it: 

Of course, we were not allowed to cheat in school and university in Germany, and the consequences could have been as severe as they can be at American institutions, but I don’t remember ever having had an explicit conversation with a German teacher or professor about how to be academically honest. There was no academic honesty policy, no Office of Academic Honesty, and no official institutional process for dealing with academic misconduct at my university—at least not that I was aware of—and I never had any formal education about cheating and how to avoid it beyond learning how to correctly cite sources. It was just expected to know how appropriate academic conduct looks like.

Exactly. That is the problem here in Germany. Despite the plagiarism scandals involving politicians, there is very little discussion here about academic integrity. The universities perhaps purchase software and offer a course or two about proper citation. Some universities have writing clinics, but that is about the size of it. Deep and continuous conversations about good academic practice are seldom. Still, I'll keep trying to drag Germany into such conversations!

 

ICAI 2022

I was going to be exceedingly lazy and not blog about the ICAI 2022 (which is celebrating its 30th year of existence!), but  then I decided that I wanted to rant about one of the talks, so I will try and pull together something on the other talks that I have visited. The conference is being offered online only. It is excellent that the Zoom room chats are left open—we have had some great discussions in parallel with the talks. It will be difficult when we go back to in-person talks to shut up during the talks :) Unfortunately, they are using waiting rooms and this causes quite a number of problems: extra work for the session chairs letting people in, and not letting us speak to each other before the talk begins. For one session the room didn't get opened until a good 6 minutes after it was to start, that was a bit unfortunate. But on the whole, people have got the hang of how to run an online conference, which is great!

I asked an organizer, Camilla J. Roberts, about the numbers. There were 790 registrations (!) from 209 universities in 18 countries: US, Canada, Chile, Australia, UK, Ireland, Germany, UAE, Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil, Jamaica, Japan, Taiwan, India, South Africa, Columbia, and Egypt! I haven't seen anyone else from Germany here, though. 

Day 1, March 8, 2022

It is International Women's Day and a holiday in Berlin, and there is a horrible war going on in the Ukraine. The latter makes it hard to concentrate, to get into the groove of academic integrity discussions. But there are so many great people here and fantastic discussions going on.

• The opening was about the past of ICAI (and the next days will be present and future). Tricia Bertram Gallant put together a document about the history:  “It Takes a Village”: The Origins of the International Center for Academic Integrity. Well worth a read!
• Thomas Lancaster and Prakhar Nagpal spoke about "Are Students Using Homework Help Sites to Breach Academic Integrity?". They scraped 46 million questions asked at the Chegg web site and metadata such as date and time of the question. They wanted to see if they were able to verify a statement that is often heard from such sites: They are there for the 3 am questions students have. From the data that they gleaned, however, it was obvious that the questions were being asked Monday through Thursday during normal working hours in the UK. More were also seen in April and December, typical exam times. The also saw a two-fold jump in the number of questions asked after Covid closed the universities than in the year before. 
• A panel discussion that surprised me was the one on "Real Life with Academic Integrity Case Management Databases" (the conference web app is a real pain, it won't let me copy the names of the people presenting, so apologies if I misspell your names). Tricia Bertram Gallant moderated presentations from Camilla J. Roberts, Emily C. Perkins, and Christina McGilvray Lane who each use a different computer system for handling academic integrity violation cases. There is not only specialized software for that, there are multiple systems??? We don't even have clear processes at universites in Germany and in the US they not only have people who have jobs dealing with such cases (and working on prevention), but there is a choice of software? And honestly, it makes sense to have a well-formulated email that gets sent to everyone and a good record of all of the documentation sent in. I didn't think to ask how they deal with documenting things like 3D designs. The systems are Macient, Guardian, and Advocate and I forgot to note down which one was used where, sorry. 
• Blaire Wilson and Christian Moriarty (not that one) spoke about "Writing Academic Integrity Policy: How Justice and Consistency Collide". They have an open-access publication available (Justice and Consistency in Academic Integrity: Philosophical and Practical Considerations in Policy Making) that deals with, among other questions, restorative justice. It really got me thinking about why we punish certain behaviors and in particular, how we deal with mitigating circumstances. It seems everyone has a specific reason for why they did something, and not all of these reasons can be codified in law. So making things consitent can cause unjustness, and making things just keep them from being consistent.

Day 2, March 9, 2022

• I attended the Canadian Regional Consortium before the conference started. As a Canadian I am interested in what is happening at the various universities. It turned out to be a very wise move, as I got to hear the keynote by Cory Scurr, the Academic Integrity Coordinator at Conestoga College in Kitchener, Ontario [boy, do those names ring a bell! Cousins of my Mom lived in Kitchener]. Cory has developed a Micro-Credential for instructors about academic integrity. They are 6 units of about 6 hours each, 1 hour synchronous discussion and 5 hours of reading/watching videos. The topics were just right for getting deeper into the topic of academic integrity. Half-jokingly someone asked if he would do a train-the-trainer course and start a franchise of the course. I'd sign up in a minute for that and translate the course into German, it is just what is necessary to get instructors aware of problems and solutions!
  
• Today the conference opened with ICAI present, or rather, since the move from Clemson University to a non-profit organization. It seemed to me that there was a bit of walking on eggshells going on, not sure what exactly happened. 
• Mary Davis spoke about "Promoting Inclusive Practice in Academic Integrity". She analyzed many guidance and process documents from UK universities that are used in academic integrity violation cases. The literature has identifed a number of issues:
  
• the continued over-representation of students from certain ethnic groups, including international students, in academic conduct investigations (Gray, 2020; Pecorari, 2016); 
• the opinion of some staff that plagiarism is an international students’ problem (Mott-Smith, Tomaš and Kostka, 2017); 
• the difficulties some student groups experience with understanding academic conduct regulations and good academic practice (Morris, 2018; Tauginiené et al., 2019);
• academic literacy teaching being available to some students and not others (Wingate, 2015). 
• Gray, D. (2020). Closing the black attainment gap on access – Project review 2018-2020. Open University. Available at: http://www.open.ac.uk/about/wideningparticipation/site/www.open.ac.uk.about.wideningparticipation/files/files/BAME-Evidence-Base.docx
  
• Morris, E. (2018). Academic integrity matters: five considerations for addressing contract cheating. International Journal of Educational Integrity, 14(15) Available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s40979-018-0038-5
• Mott-Smith, J., Tomaš, Z. and Kostka, I. (2017). Teaching effective source use. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
• Pecorari, D. (2016). Plagiarism, international students and the second-language writer. In T. Bretag (Ed.) Handbook of Academic Integrity, pp.537-550. Singapore: Springer.
• Tauginiené, L., Gaižauskaité, I., Razi, S., Glendinning, I., Sivasubramaniam, S., Marino, F., Cosentino, M., Anohina-Naumeca, A. and Kravjar, J. (2019). Enhancing the taxonomies relating to academic integrity and misconduct. Journal of Academic Ethics, pp.1-17, Available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-019-09342-4
• Wingate, U. (2015). Academic literacy and student diversity: the case for inclusive practice. Bristol: Multilingual Matters
• I included all the literature here, because this is an important topic. Mary looked for problems with respect to these issues and has formulated recommendations for inclusive academic integrity, which are to be published soon.
  
• Sarah Elaine Eaton chaired a panel on "Reconceptualizing Contract Cheating as Part of the Stress Process Model". This was a presentation of sociologists talking about how we process stress and how contract cheating can be seen as a method of alleviating stress. It made me think about all the stress that we produce in education for our students and for us. What can we do to reduce this stress that doesn't result in cheating?
• Leeanne Morrow and Lee-Ann Penaluna from the University of Calgary presented on "Expanding into the digital: supporting academic integrity using artificial intelligence". I was especially interested to see what type of artificial intelligence they would be using. It turns out, they purchased a bot that jumps at everyone who surfs to their pages at the library and asks if you need help. I personally hate these pesky things, but whatever. They also have a live chat during office hours, so a real human being can answer student questions.
  One thing I must make clear: A chatbot is NOT in any way, shape, or form "artificial intelligence" (as I call it, "magic fairy dust"). It is an algorithm that I have my first-semester programming students program to show them that what we percieve of as being "intelligence" is merely a very simple algorithm. I also want to kindly request that people not anthropomorphisize computers! They do not have a "brain". You do not "feed" them. They don't "answer". They have storage, receive input, and produce output.
  The authors of this research accessed a large amount of questions that students had asked both in live chat and in bot chat and analyzed it. They looked for key words that they felt were related to academic integrity and had a look at how often typical questions were asked and what the bot answered. The bot upon first install traverses their site to parse through the texts that are offered. After looking at the answers given for specific questions, they fine-tuned the system by editing the bot output for certain keywords.
  What really concerned me about this research was that, although it was about academic integrity, there appeared to be no informed consent that was given by the users of the bot to have their conversations stored. Apparantly, the conversations are "anonymous" and given cute names like "Red Squirrel", but the date and time is stored, as most certainly the IP address would also be stored. This is considered identifying information.
  I asked about informed consent and ethics board approval for this research, apparently neither was done. I looked at the bot myself, looking for where I am being informed that what I am typing is being stored and can be used for future research. Since I am in the EU using this system, it must either ask my permission or not permit me to use it.
  Alright, enough bitching. They meant well, but the company that sold this bot to them needs to shape up their advertising language and be open about what they are storing. As long as you are transparent about what you are doing, people have a choice of using the system or not.
  
• The day closed with "30 Years of Research & Lessons Learned": David Rettinger and Trician Bertram Gallant decided to put together an issue of the Journal of College and Character on academic integrity. They asked around and got lots of great papers—and realized they were not only over the page count for the issue, they were MASSIVELY over the page count for the issue. So they decided to make a virtue out of necessity and put split the papers between the journal and a book, Cheating Academic Integrity: Lessons from 30 Years of Research, that will appear in June 2022. What a great way to make all these papers available! The authors who were at the conference spoke a bit about what they were writing about. The journal issue is available open-access, so I downloaded all the papers right away, and have the book on order!
  

Day 3, March 10, 2022

• I started off visiting the COIN group, Consortium for Online Integrity. I wanted to hear more about how people were doing assessments online. There are a number of universities that swear by remote proctoring, either personal remote proctoring or "AI"-based (remember, the term "artificial intelligence is a synonym for "magic fairy dust") proctoring. I find remote proctoring to be an invasion of privacy and to use algorithms that are heavily biased. People believe that they can "lock down" browsers, but my CS students don't need more than 10 minutes to get out of that. So it doesn't do what people want it to. Don't project what you want onto a software! Software cannot solve social problems.
  
• Christian Moriarty moderated a town hall on the future of ICAI. Thomas Lancaster and I had a nice little public disagreement about the use of technology that really lit up the chat :) I believe that academic integrity is a social issue and thus cannot be solved by technology alone, as I just mentioned. We need to focus on pedagogy.
  
• Angela Murphy asked in her presentation "The Usage of Remote Proctoring Technologn to Uphold Academic Integrity During a Pandemic": Is there more cheating going on in the pandemic? Many instructors think so, but maybe they just didn't see the cheating that went on before the pandemic! She was very enthusiastic about remote proctoring, but I find it an invasion of privacy and a waste of instructor time reviewing the videos. I personally thnik that we need to focus more on alternative assessments that what we have been doing before. 
• Kathryn Baron, the host of the podcastthescore.com podcast, spoke on "Helping journalists inform the public about cheating". She apparently didn't realize who was in the audience, as she spent 15 minutes telling us what we already know in depth: There is a lot of cheating out there. It was a bit disappointing. I already help journalists who contact me by sending them links to sources for what I am saying. And I patiently explain over and over again that we don't know how much plagiarism is out there because we only know what we find, not what we don't find. And yes, there was plagiarism before the Internet. My major problem is that journalists are generally only interested when the person found having submitted a plagiarism is well-known, i.e. a politician. And the universities, well, this picture of a man with his head in the sand rather sums it up. 
• Unfortunately, the presenters on "Factors impacting academic integrity: a review" didn't show up and didn't let anyone know that they were not coming. So I went to the session by Ide Bagus Siaputra from Indonesia "Transforming modular training into integrated immunization programme for promoting academic integrity: Celebrating 9 Years of progress". He has been instrumental in getting a discussion going about academic integrity in his country and has prepared materials for teachers there.
• David Rettinger finished up the conference talking about the ICAI/McCabe Survey. I am so glad that Don McCabe's work is continuing! The survey is geared to determine the rates of academic misconduct, assessing the climate of integrity, understanding student perspectives, and providing a benchmark against other institutions. They are starting with a first round in 2022 for ICAI member institutions, currently have 7800 surveys completed. It will be exciting to hear these results! And during the discussion I realized that David and I met years ago [I looked it up: 2012] in Bielefeld, Germany, where Don McCabe was giving a talk after having given a talk in Berlin. I drove Don down and we had very intensive discussion during the drive down.
  

Whew, it's been an exhausting 3 days, starting so late in the day. But I'm so glad I attended, lots of new ideas and meeting a few new people, if not as many as one meets at in-person conferences. 

Now, hope to see people at the ENAI conference ECAIP 2022 in Porto, Portugal 4-6 May 2022 in real life!

Czech researcher found guilty of academic misconduct, resigns position as rector

Leonid Schneider reported in his blog For Better Science on October 25, 2021 about a series of comments that Elizabeth Bik left on PubPeer about 21 of the 720 publications of a Czech cancer and nanotechnology researcher, Vojtěch Adam. He had been elected to have assumed the role of rector of the Mendel University of Brno on February 1, 2022.

However, as Elizabeth Bik reported in Science Integrity Digest on January 25, 2022,  the investigation committee has found him guilty of academic misconduct. The committee came to this conclusion in record time, only three months. The investigation report is available in English and concludes: "The Committee recommends retracting at least 6 papers to correct the scientific record."

Today Adam resigned from the position as rector, leaving it vacant. 

In a statement in Czech issued on January 31, 2022, Vojtěch Adam stated that he is putting the needs of the university above his own as a scientist and thus will not become rector tomorrow. The university has noted that the Academic Senate of the Mendel University today appointed an election commission to start a new search for a rector. It is not clear who will lead the university from tomorrow.

Update: I just found a very long blog article by Petr Kreuz in Czech (Google translate is your friend) from January 30, 2022 about Adam, who was previously responsible for PhD studies at the Mendel University. Some doctoral dissertations from that institution appear to be plagiarized, VroniPlag Wiki has currently published two documentations, Sai and Kst, and have more currently under consideration. The Mendel University worked closely with an Austrian company that was offering doctorates from Mendel University for a fee of 25.000 €.

Swedish national academic integrity board posts 2020 report

Sweden started a new national academic integrity board, Npof (Nämnden för prövning av oredlighet i forskning, The National Board for Assessment of Research Misconduct) on January 1, 2020. It has been tasked with investigating cases referred to it by Swedish universities or by individuals who directly inform the body. They look at cases of suspected FFP (Falsification, Fabrication, Plagiarism) that arise, since at the same time a new law took effect: Lagen (2019:504) om ansvar för god forskningssed och prövning av oredlighet i forskning. All researchers in Sweden are now legally required to follow a codex for good academic practice, which is based on the ALLEA code of conduct. Universities are still permitted to examine cases themselves, but now have a place to refer complicated cases. Decisions of Npof can be appealed to the Administrative Court in Uppsala.

The vision statement of Npof is

Everyone should be able to rely on Swedish research. Therfore, every researcher must follow good research practices. Suspicions of research misconduct need to be examined in a legally secure, transparent, and clear fashion. [my translation]

The body is subordinate to the Swedish Ministry of Education. They are required to publish a report on the cases they have investigated every year. The report for 2020 is now published on their web page along with a few statistics. They still have 8 cases from 2020 to deal with, and 16 new complaints have been lodged in 2021 already. There were 46 cases in 2020, of which 11 were ones that were already being investigated by the universities and were handed over as part of the law coming into effect. In the decisions they only found 4 persons guilty of misconduct, the rest were either not considered (11) or found not guilty (10) of serious misconduct.

The current list of final decisions (with the names redacted) from both 2020 and 2021 are also available on the web site.

• 9 decisions concern both falsification and fabrication, 2 from Karolinska Institutet, 1 each from Lund and Umeå, and 5 registered from an individual.
• 1 decision is only about fabrication of data, from Linköping, and is the appeal of a researcher who was previously found guilty of research misconduct.
• 7 decisions are only about falsification of data, an appeal from Karolinska, 2 cases from Lund, 1 from Göteborg, and 3 registered from an individual.
• 14 cases have to do with plagiarism (and self-plagiarism). 3 are from Lund, 2 from Linköping, one each from Uppsala, Göteborg, Örebro and Umeå, 3 from individuals. One case involves an appeal from the individual in a case from Uppsala and one other is also an appeal by the informant. 
• They don't publish reports on cases they don't investigate.
  

The 68-page, richly illustrated report notes in the introduction that so many of the cases that were investigated actually involved personal conflicts or other kinds of problems, in particular authorship questions. But Npof only looks at FFP, not at the many other types conduct that could be considered academic misconduct, or at questionable research practices. They also note that when the preparations were being made for setting up Npof, they were only expecting about 15 cases a year. 

They report that the cases brought to Npof were in all fields with the exception of agriculture and veterinary medicine, but most of the cases were in medicine and health. The universities have to report back what they have done in the cases in which a researcher is found guilty of misconduct. In two cases, the researcher quit the university. In another, the university started a course on research ethics for the entire institution. A fourth case resulted in discussions about research ethics being conducted within the research group. 

Npof can also initiate their own investigations, but they had so much else to do, that they haven't yet had such a case. I do find it unfortunate that the person who informs Npof of a case is not considered part of the case and thus is not included in any future communication. 

The report includes much reflection on how the universities found this switch to a new body and how the body itself saw the problems that the universities have. It will be interesting to see how the work of Npof continues in the future!

ECAIP 2021 - Day 3

 What? It's Friday already? Last day of the conference! Lots of good stuff still to hear.

Day 0 - Day 1 - Day 2 - Day 3

ECAIP 2021 - Day 2

European Conference on Academic Integrity and Plagiarism 2021

Day 0 - Day 1 - Day 2 - Day 3