"Has the duplicate been checked" and "Has the paper been weighted"...... As the graduation season approaches, the "greetings" among graduates have quietly changed. Out of the constraints of academic misconduct, the plagiarism check rate is an important indicator to measure the originality of a paper. In order to pass the dissertation smoothly, students often pay for the plagiarism check service by themselves. However, the various channels for checking duplicates, the uneven results of duplicate checks, and the rising cost of checking duplicate make graduates very tired.
A piece of "heart disease" for graduates
"It cost thousands of dollars to check the duplicate", "It is very inaccurate, the duplicate check rate of this store is 4.7%, the school checks 28.9%, and the graduation is almost postponed" "The school checked and revised again, and after the change, I paid for 19% and found out that it was 6.8%, and the gap was too big and I had to pay for another one to find another test"......
Banyuetan reporter searched and found that some online store evaluations that purchased duplicate checking services were full of complaints from graduates, who were troubled by the uneven results of duplicate checking on various platforms, and spent a lot of unjust money. According to different databases and duplicate checking methods, the cost ranges from 1 yuan to 10 yuan per 1,000 words, and some platforms under the banner of "consistent with the results of the school duplicate check and comparison database" require 300 to 500 yuan for a paper, or even thousands of yuan.
After Xiao Zhang, a fourth-year history student who is about to graduate from a general undergraduate college in Fujian, completed his graduation thesis, he painstakingly searched for a strategy. "There are many types of duplicate checking websites, such as CNKI, VIP, Wanfang, Chaoxing, etc., which are dazzling, and it is really not easy to find a reliable and affordable one." He said that as a liberal arts student, even if it is an original paper, he is worried that the citation rate will be too high, and it is essential to check the duplicate in advance.
"Many schools offer free plagiarism checking software that limits the number of queries. In order to meet the requirements of the duplicate check, the vast majority of students have to pay for a separate duplicate check. Xiao He, a graduate student at Peking University, said.
The reporter found that colleges and universities require the upper limit of the dissertation repetition rate to range from 10% to 30%, and the dissertations at different degree levels must meet different standards, and each school sets its own standards. If the plagiarism rate exceeds the upper limit, you will not be allowed to participate in the submission of the paper for review, which will lead to a delay in completion, and the paper can be revised for at least 3 months before you can reapply for plagiarism checking.
When the repetition rate exceeds the standard, students will do everything possible to "fancy weight reduction". Tan Xiao, a graduate student at a university in Jiangsu, said that his paper has more than 10 words just for a proper noun, plus several commonly used fixed collocations, and it will be marked red as soon as it is checked, which makes people laugh. "In order to reduce the repetition rate, we have thought of many ways, either to replace synonyms, or to adjust the sentence structure, change the permutations and combinations, which is really racking our brains."
Students reported that because the duplicate check is a "just need", there are not only fake WeChat public accounts and Taobao accounts of CNKI, Wanfang, and VIP on the market, resulting in inaccurate duplicate check results, but also the problem of "paper leakage" that resells the submitted duplicate check papers and is published by others first, which makes the students "more worried".
Who is the spawn of the hot market?
The original intention of the plagiarism check was to urge students to standardize the writing of papers and improve the quality of academic results, but it "changed its taste" in the relationship between supply and demand and market profit-making. Banyuetan reporter's investigation found that the platform, students and schools have "added fire" to the plagiarism market.
At present, the duplicate checking and comparison resources are mainly monopolized by some database platforms. According to industry insiders, CNKI, VIP and other databases that include a wide range of journal papers, books and network resources have become the main objects for universities to seek cooperation. For example, according to the plagiarism check channel released by a university in Northeast China, the university's library designated the use of the "(CNKI) Academic Misconduct Literature Detection System 5.3" for paid testing, and the tested dissertations were automatically entered into CNKI's academic paper joint comparison database one year after the date of testing.
"This means that the plagiarism checking agency not only earns the cost of plagiarism checking, which is paid for by students, but also obtains students' personal information and the full text of the paper, which are included in the database to further enrich resources." Hong Zhizhong, an associate professor at the Institute of Education of Xiamen University, said.
All kinds of commercial plagiarism checking platforms are even more chaotic. Some institutions claim that the plagiarism checking system contains "school-built databases" and is "surplus quotas in colleges and universities", which can be consistent with the results of school plagiarism checks, and constantly raise prices. According to industry insiders, many commercial duplicate checking systems deliberately increase the duplicate check rate in order to sell more duplicate check reports, transform manual weight reduction and AI weight reduction to make profits.
The interviewed students said that the students repeatedly checked the duplicate and checked the duplicate at a high price, and there were also factors such as not being serious about writing their own papers and plagiarism. "Students should be very clear about whether they have plagiarism when writing their papers, and some people try to get away with it by replacing synonyms and word order after checking for plagiarism." Tsinghua University student Huang said. This has also given birth to the "one-stop service of weight checking and weight reduction", in which machine weight reduction, manual payment weight reduction, technical weight reduction, translation conversion and other operations are free from the gray area.
At the same time, many experts began to question whether it was reasonable to set the standard for plagiarism checking. Cheng De'an, a professor at Southwest University of Political Science and Law, pointed out that due to technical limitations, although the plagiarism checking system can identify the duplicate content between the submitted paper and the database literature, it cannot accurately judge the citation relationship, and there are problems of "misjudgment" and "missed judgment".
In recent years, major colleges and universities have improved the standard of plagiarism checking of graduation theses, and many famous universities require the plagiarism rate to be less than 5%, and even individual tutors require less than 2%, and some small papers or reports in courses have begun to require plagiarism. Wu Qiuxiang, assistant professor of the School of Education of Chinese People's University, believes that simply using the technical means of checking duplicates to determine the situation of students' papers "one size fits all", and even evaluating the quality of papers, is not scientific, and can only force students to be opportunistic and use various methods to avoid the problem of high duplicate checking rate.
Let the duplicate check return to its original meaning
"It is necessary to check the plagiarism of papers, and it is more important to improve the quality." Cheng De'an believes that colleges and universities need to further improve the quality review method of papers, evaluate papers in multiple dimensions, and eliminate the plagiarism rate of papers as the absolute standard for entering the defense.
Due to the different nature of thesis writing in humanities and social sciences and science and engineering, it is necessary to classify the plagiarism checking standards for different disciplines, and appropriately reduce the plagiarism checking requirements for some humanities and social sciences majors. For example, analysis of policy texts, research on the views of celebrities, and citations of legal texts and historical documents may lead to a high degree of textual repetition, but this does not fall under the category of academic misconduct.
Wu Qiuxiang and other interviewed experts suggested that students with excessive repetition rates could be provided with an opportunity to appeal, and experts could be organized to review and make resolutions on this part of the papers. For the papers that pass the duplicate check rate, they can also be reviewed from the ideological expression, innovation, theory and other aspects of the paper, so as to avoid "judging the advantages and disadvantages of the duplicate check".
Many students appealed that they hoped that the school would further open up its resources and provide regular channels for multiple duplicate checking services, instead of looking for it everywhere on the Internet.
Hong Zhizhong believes that it is also necessary to strengthen the management of the duplicate checking platform, strengthen market supervision and public opinion guidance, standardize the paid services of the duplicate checking platform, establish a scientific and transparent service system, and rectify illegal profit-making behavior. It is urgent for the relevant departments to give guidance on the charging standards of institutions and review the relevant qualifications.
In the final analysis, academic norms need to be grasped from the source, and colleges and universities should do a good job in the education of students' scientific ethics and study style construction from the undergraduate stage, and carry out necessary thesis writing guidance. Schools and tutors should earnestly assume the responsibility of guidance, carry out relevant training for students, and enhance their awareness of academic ethics.
Half Moon Talk Reporter: Deng Qianqian, Wei Mengjia, Ke Gaoyang
*This article is the content of the 8th issue of "Half Moon Talk" in 2024
Original title: "The duplicate check rate of this store is 19%, and the paper is 6.8% for another one, and the graduates are a little worried"