A number of universities have paid more heed and started taking action to curb plagiarism, which has become a major issue among students and instructors in Viet Nam.

This illustrative photo shows students at a job fair in Viet Nam. (Photo: Tuoi Tre)

At a conference on academic integrity held by Ho Chi Minh City-based Hoa Sen (Lotus) University on May 29, representatives of several local universities said that plagiarism among students in Viet Nam is worse than the global average.

Vo Thanh Hai, rector of Duy Tan University, shocked the event with his school’s survey of freshmen with the question, “Have you ever copied a whole essay, a paragraph or more than half a page without mentioning references?”

The results showed that only 16 percent of the students said no, while the rest admitted that they had plagiarized.

Of the ‘yes’ responses, 49 percent simply said ‘yes’ without indicating how many times they had copied with no reference, 13.5 percent said they had done it many times, 12 percent confessed they do it regularly, and 9.5 percent claimed they do not do it regularly.

In explaining why they did not mention the authors of the original writings they quoted, 36 percent said they did not know the reference methodology, 12 percent said they did not remember who the authors were, 21 percent blamed the pressure of their assignments, and nine percent declared that they did not care about references.

Meanwhile, Hoa Sen University also presented a research on plagiarism by comparing 681 essays written by students from the human resource, tourism, finance, accounting, sales, and marketing majors with published documents.

The results were considered alarming, too.

According to Dr. Do Ba Khang, a member of the team which conducted the research, the similarities found between the essays and published documents were 29 percent on average, a high rate compared to the rest of the world.

In other countries, only 10-20 percent, or even five percent, of the writings found similar with published documents are considered plagiarism, Khang stressed.

Thus, 73 percent or 84 percent of the surveyed essays will be construed as plagiarism if the rate of similarity is 20 percent or 15 percent respectively.

The research also pointed out that long essays had a higher rate of plagiarism than short ones.
Plagiarism has also been detected among instructors and MBA students.

The Maritime University in the northern city of Hai Phong has paid close attention to its instructors and MBA students as well as their lesson plans, graduation theses, and scientific articles in order to find out any academic dishonesty, if any.

After examination, a number of MBA graduation theses were rejected since they had similarities with other documents.

Many scientific articles with a similarity rate which was higher than regulated were also disqualified.

(Source: Tuoi Tre News)