Mumbai: Mumbai University (MU), has now set up a committee to address the issue of plagiarism in thesis submission after repeated protests by students. The committee will check errors, copied content and prevent any acts of plagiarism for final year students of all programmes.
Till now, the university did not have a Plagiarism Disciplinary Authority (PDA) to scrutinise cases of copying in thesis submission. This was reported by The Free Press Journal on February 14, after which the management council took this decision.
There was no system in place to check or rectify the errors research projects of the students, because since the teachers were checking these manually, as they had no access to computers or any facility to cross check online. They were also responsible to notice if students had picked up content from a foreign university and used it in their own thesis project.
Now, the university has decided to use the Turnitin software to check for discrepancies in the thesis. Shomit Salunke, a MPhil student and visiting faculty of MU, said, “We are glad the university has decided to form a committee. This will help to check for copied content submitted by students.”
Students claimed thesis submission is the most important part of their course as their final grades depend on it. Soumya Jaiswal, a student, said, “We hope this committee will keep a thorough check, since we have found plagiarised content among our classmates. We admit that often some of us tend to rephrase certain content and use it as our own, in order get good grades.”
Authorities of MU claimed it will be the the responsibility of this committee to check the authenticity of thesis projects. A senior officer of MU said, “This committee will focus on measures to check, notify and prevent plagiarism for all departments. We will follow guidelines of the University Grants Commission (UGC).”
