By Bahk Eun-ji
More than four in five professors at 4-year universities nationwide do not report plagiarism committed by colleagues, a survey showed Wednesday.
According to a survey of 600 professors by Kyosu Shinmoon (Weekly Professor), 23.7 percent of the respondents said they pretend they are unaware of plagiarism when they detect evidence of the unethical practice in their colleagues’ work. This is an increase of more five-times from 4 percent recorded in a 2001 survey.
An additional 63 percent of the professors said they handle it “quietly,” meaning they don’t report it to the school authorities or take appropriate actions to hold their colleagues accountable for the copying.
Asked about the severity of plagiarism among professors, 5.3 percent assessed it as “very serious,” 35.3 percent as “largely serious,” 40.8 percent “so so,” and the remainder judged it “largely not serious.”
Some professors said performance-based evaluations contribute to prevalent plagiarism and weak ethical standards. Each university has a different evaluation system, but these are mostly based on how many theses professors publish in authoritative academic journals.
“If some professors close their eyes to the faults of their colleagues, it means they don’t trust each other at the same time,” said a professor at a Seoul-based university, who asked only to be identified by his surname Lee,.
Lee said that some professors, particularly those in the humanities succumb to pressure to maintain their academic posts. “To some degree, professors are forced to publish many papers to meet the appraisal standards, so some of them take the easy way, although that can never be an excuse for plagiarism,” he said.
He pointed out the existing system has to be improved so that professors are evaluated across a range of criteria, instead of merely counting the number of papers they publish.
The survey also showed that 24.3 percent of professors cited “reckless participation in politics,” such as running in parliamentary elections, as the most serious problem involving professors. Plagiarism came in second place with 23.5 percent, and poor reviews of papers came third with 23.3 percent.
To criticism that “universities are dead,” 57.8 percent of respondents agreed, 22.2 percent somewhat agreed and 20 percent responded, “No.”