Q&A: Wilfried Decoo on plagiarism by students

When did you become interested in this issue?
In 1997, I was asked to give advice related to an award Antwerp University wanted to give to honour a PhD student. I soon discovered that the major part of the student’s thesis was plagiarised. The author hadn’t done any of their own research, with the consequence that the thesis could have been written in about six weeks. I started to study the phenomenon thoroughly, which culminated in my book on the subject, which I published in 2002: Crisis on Campus: Confronting Academic Misconduct.

Isn’t there a pretty big grey area between plagiarised and original work, especially among secondary school students?

Sometimes plagiarism is patently obvious, such as when entire paragraphs are copied without any reference. But in most cases the perpetrator isn’t so naive. Often they deliberately seek out that grey area. Students can be inspired by numerous sources, sneak sentences in here and there and mingle them with their own words. The result is an amalgam that’s very hard to unravel. In time, students become skilled at producing such mingled texts.

How can teachers recognise plagiarism?

In general, when a student delivers a “perfect” text – of a much higher quality than the teacher had expected – it often concerns a direct copy of an external, qualitative source. Conversely, a text that contains errors and deviations that are normally not found in a Flemish context is also often of dubious origins.

A lot of “French” educational material is on non-francophone websites, from Germany or the UK. Interferences from these languages are often easy to recognise. For example, a Flemish student could betray themselves due to the automatic spelling and grammar checker on the computer of an unknown English-speaking student.

How hard is it to find irrefutable proof of plagiarism?

Before you penalise a student, you have to be 100% sure that they have indeed committed plagiarism. There are some tricks. Teachers can search online for a certain passage of words between quotation marks, so they can find those words in their precise order. If they’re lucky, the student has even copied the spelling mistakes, by which the teacher can find the original source more easily.