Plagiarism rampant at Peking University, Yale professor says
Biology professor says issue is reflective of academic honesty problem throughout China
Plagiarism rampant at Peking University, Yale professor says
Biology professor says issue is reflective of academic honesty problem throughout China
Friday, December 28, 2007
Updated Friday 2:28 a.m. A Yale biology professor who taught at Peking University this fall as part of a joint program between the two schools has accused the Chinese school of turning a blind eye toward plagiarism, raising questions about the academic integrity of an institution that is a central partner in Yale’s internationalization efforts.
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology professor Stephen C. Stearns ’67 sent a passionate, 958-word e-mail to his students at Peking this month, bemoaning the rampant cheating he witnessed while teaching two courses at the university. In his message, Stearns said he was “leaving with very mixed feelings” because of the behavior he had observed.
“The fact that I have encountered this much plagiarism … tells me something about the behavior of other professors and administrators here,” Stearns wrote. “They must tolerate a lot of it, and when they detect it, they cover it up without serious punishment, probably because they do not want to lose face. If they did punish it, it would not be this frequent.”
Launched in 2006, the Peking University–Yale University Joint Undergraduate Program allows Yale students to spend a semester living and studying with Peking University students on the school’s Beijing campus. Through the program Yale students take classes in English with Peking University and Yale faculty and receive full course credit at Yale.
Stearns’ e-mail raises questions about whether Peking University’s courses are as rigorous as Yale’s.
Allegations of plagiarism at Yale nearly always result in a hearing before the Executive Committee, the College’s student disciplinary body. Students found guilty typically face probation, suspension or expulsion, assistant Yale College dean and ExComm Secretary Jill Cutler told the News in September.
In an e-mail message to the News on Sunday, Stearns said he has been inundated with over 100 e-mails from China and beyond regarding his message, which he said was originally intended as advice for his students at Peking, not for a wider audience.
His missive has since been posted in English and in Chinese on several Chinese Web sites and was the subject of a report on the Web site of the Chronicle of Higher Education last week. Stearns said he allowed his students to post the message online because they thought it would be helpful to students elsewhere.
In his e-mail, Stearns said three students in his courses this fall received failing grades for plagiarism. Rampant academic dishonesty “fits into a larger pattern of behavior in China” that includes widespread sale of pirated DVDs and a disregard for international intellectual property standards, he added.
Stearns said in the letter one Peking University sociology professor who copied an entire book into Chinese and published it in his own name did not lose his job when he was caught.
“China ignores international intellectual property rights,” Stearns said. “[Peking University] sees nothing wrong in copying my textbook, for example, in complete violation of international copyright agreements, causing me to lose income, stealing from me quite directly. No one in China seems to care.”
In a message circulated at Peking University, the dean of the College of Life Sciences at Peking, Yi Rao, vowed that any faculty member he has hired since assuming his position would be fired if found to have been academically dishonest.
“We do encounter many problems,” Rao said in his message, “but it is the hope for an increasingly better future that keep [sic] us working to improve the university, to make it great in one day when it contributes more to the world than it takes from the world.”
“We will regain our long held tradition of honesty and trust,” he said.
Stearns, meanwhile, said he met with senior administrators at Peking before returning to the United States last month and was assured the university would take his feedback to heart.
“They told me that they took plagiarism very seriously and are going to work actively to reduce it,” he said, adding, “Their stance is constructive and gives hope.”
But the professor is not the only one to raise questions about academic integrity at Peking University. In an e-mail message, a Yale senior, who studied abroad through the Peking program last spring said the university “definitely” had a more relaxed attitude toward plagiarism than Yale.
The student, who asked to remain anonymous, said he and another Yalie who participated in the program both witnessed overt acts of plagiarism while at Peking.
“All of [the Yale students at Peking] both witnessed and heard about … acts of plagiarism,” said the senior. “We had Chinese partners in many of our classes who would take excerpts from books without notating them or changing them in any way.”
Copying and pasting from Internet sources was also common, the student said. Students were never told they could not lift material word-for-word and present it as their own, the student said.
Academic corruption is widespread across China, according to experts on higher education in China. Fang Shi-min, a Chinese molecular biologist and de facto plagiarism watchdog, told the Chronicle last year that he has tracked nearly 500 cases of plagiarism and other forms of misconduct at the country’s leading universities, which he chronicles on a Web site devoted to the subject. And last year, more than 100 top academics across the country signed an open letter urging Chinese officials to crack down on academic corruption
“Even when a case is exposed,” Fang told the Chronicle, “the university will usually try to cover it up — particularly when the accused is a big shot — to protect the fame and gain of the university.”
Yale administrators who oversee the Peking University–Yale University Joint Undergraduate Program could not immediately be reached for comment.
Peking University, sometimes called “the Harvard of China,” has a student body of about 30,000, including 15,000 undergraduates. It is also a member of the International Alliance of Research Universities, the ten-school consortium of which Yale was a founding member.
Comments
None 4 years, 4 months ago
Plagiarism happens everywhere, even here at Yale. People buy pirated DVDs regardless of where they are educated.
The Yale in China program, however, seems to me a great waste of time and energy. While China is beset by problems such as widening social gap, pollution, and inadequate educational resources, Yale is flying undergrads in to live in comfortable dorms and take classes together with a small number of elites. Well, this continues the tradition of Yalies in many ways, and will probably produce some potential CEOs for import export companies. But why bother flying those people there to take a limited number of courses available?
Yale might as well donate the money pointlessly spent on this project to help underpriviliged Chinese kids to get proper education so that they won't lose their arms or legs in American toy factories in Shenzhen. The amount that has been spent on this project should be able to buy a large number of books and send them to kids in remote countryside where even a pencil is precious. I feel ashamed that Yale is wasting its money, which I believe partly comes from the growth of Chinese economy, which in turn takes toll on the lives of many common Chinese people.
We should start a petition that the Yale in China program be changed into something more meaningful.
flyingpanda123@gmail.com
None 4 years, 4 months ago
Getting involved with PKU was a big mistake from the get-go. The next time the Chinese regime slaughters its own people on Tiananmen Square, be prepared to find some Yale bodies in the heap. Folks, the PRC is not England or France.
None 4 years, 4 months ago
While one can debates the merits of various academic exchange programs on several grounds, the very purpose of such foreign experiences for Yale students is to porvide first-hand experience of the difference between the PRC and "home".... yes, Beijing is not Kansas, but neither is England or France. Might not we be living in a different (better?) world had George Bush spent his Yale junior year as an exchange student in Baghdad?
None 4 years, 4 months ago
It's also important for people to understand the cultural context in which this type of plagiarism is occuring. As a recent Yale grad and a citizen of another Asian country (who has lived and studied in that country for more than half of his life), I can guarantee you that plagiarism exists even throughout the more developed countries in Asia, such as Japan or South Korea. Is it because of a lack of respect for intellectual property rights and a lack of education on plagiarism? Perhaps in part. But the more important thing to consider is that these are all societies in which the name (prestige) of the university you graduate from carries incredible weight in determining your future, more so than how you actually perform in classes. And the way you get into these high-regarded universities in Asia is not through a process that we are used to in the U.S. - in which essays, high school transcripts, extracurricular activities, etc., are all considered - but purely through exams. That is, you take an entrance exam (or two), everyone who takes the exam is ranked according to their scores, and the people at the top of that list are the ones who get in.
Within this context, plagiarism can be rampant because students will do whatever they can to get the best grade possible on those exams. Although I will be careful not to say that everyone is this way, most people that I've worked with don't seem to care much about what they are learning in the process and lack an inclination to think for themselves. As long as they get a good score on the exam, everything is okay. Understandably, students also plagiarize material for "not-so-important" assignments that don't have a direct impact on their future, i.e. entrance exams (for universities, grad schools, jobs, etc.). So, on the most important assignments, students cheat to get the best grade possible, and on the less important assignments, students cheat anyways because they don't want to spend time on something that won't directly impact their future aspirations.
Again, I'd like to emphasize that not everyone is this way, but the majority of students are, at least from my experience. The problem starts not in the universities but in elementary schools, where copying someone else's homework becomes the norm (whether because you don't have time or you don't care) while you study for hours every night in cram schools that prepare you specifically for rigorous entrance exams.
As plagiarism in Asia is deeply rooted in these cultural factors, it will be hard to get rid of. But by no means should Yale abandon its relationship with Peking U., because that does nothing to solve the problem. Rather, it should launch some kind of an effort to teach educators in Asia about the vices of plagiarism and the merits of a liberal-arts type of education. The only way that this problem can be dealt dealt with is for Asian scholars to abandon the practice of plagiarism themselves and learn how to train their students to do the same.
None 4 years, 5 months ago
As a Yale grad and someone who taught in Chinese universities for two years -- plagiarism by students in my experience was very widespread and was tacitly condoned by teachers. One student, who was brilliant, told me that her adviser, who was prominent in the field, had told her to insert an entire paragraph from a book written by an MIT professor into her senior thesis. Without any attribution. I called the professor and he acknowledged this with a laugh.
None 4 years, 5 months ago
Ad hominem attacks don't refute the fact that there are apparently serious questions about the academic integrity of PKU. Coupled with the fact that the university's administrators tow the line of the Chinese Communist Party at the expense of academic freedom, Yale needs to seriously reevaluate its relationship with this university.
None 4 years, 5 months ago
If, hypothetically speaking, there were a patent claim in a published application open to the public in 2002, which claim was allowed and appeared 2004 (US6767734B), AND that claim were infringed by actions AFTER the 2002 publication (say in 2003), there would be an action for infringement under the current law on pre-grant damages.
Failing to cite (known) prior work is plagiarism, BUT infringing a patent claim violates the law, whether or not one knew about the patent claim. "Intent" is not an element of patent infringement, although willful infringement can increase damages.
None 4 years, 5 months ago
As a long-time academic with experience teaching in China, I agree with Steve Stearns's view that the actions he terms plagiarism are common among Chinese scholars. However, so cultural perspective is important here, too. Traditional Chinese scholars were rewarded by their ability to incorporate "classics" into their civil service exam essays, and because these classics were well-known to the examiners (such as a quote from Shakespeare or the Bible might not be referenced in a Western essay), citations were not thought to be necessary. I was once asked to read a review article written by a colleague (an eminent Chinese scholar) and was distressed to find that it was a pastiche of others' work. Her bewildered reply was that "in China, it was considered extreme flattery to use another's words, since it implied they wrote much better than one's self."
Yale students, too, cut and paste from the internet....one of my Yale students asked me to disregard her final paper be cause it was a rough draft in which she had not had time to go through it and "paraphrase" (in effect, conceal) the paste-up from the internet...
We need to continue to explain, educate, and value intellectual creation, and cannot assume that all people in all cultures know and share the values we advocate at Yale.
None 4 years, 5 months ago
This just in from the Peking U Daily News: "Plagiarism rampant at Peking University, Yale professor says Biology professor says issue is reflective of academic honesty problem throughout China
A Yale biology professor who taught at Peking University this fall as part of a joint program between the two schools has accused the Chinese school of turning a blind eye toward plagiarism, raising questions about the academic integrity of an institution that is a central partner in Yale’s internationalization efforts. "
At least it's the "Harvard" of China -- given the stories on plagiarism by a student and prominent faculty at Harvard, the Chinese could be said to be doing their best to live up to that appellation.
None 4 years, 5 months ago
I doubt Stephen Stearns’s sincerity in fighting against violation of intellectual property right. This is because he was involved in a much greater and even more shameful violation of intellectual property.
In a 2003 publication in Science (300: 1920) which was authored by his former student Martin Ackermann, himself, and his former colleague in Switzerland he cheated the whole world by claiming that “A fundamental question about senescence has not been settled: Which organisms should be senescent, and which should be potentially immortal?” This is an outright lie because I had already published a view that all organisms (including the so-called “immortal” bacteria) are mortal and subject to aging/senescence (see more details at http://im1.biz/Aging.htm);.
Due to the deception buried in that 2003 Science publication, western world has regarded Ackermann, Stearns and Jenal as pioneers in studying bacterial aging. But the truth is I was the true pioneer in this research area and has published most on this topic. Jenal (who later became a mentor of Ackermann) should know my study because he was at the same session of the 1997 ASM General Meeting where I presented my discovery of bacterial life and aging to the world for the first time. However, my publications, including a peer-reviewed and SCI-indexed publication in both English (Science in China 42: 64-654, 1999) and Chinese (Science in China 29: 571-579, 1999), were ignored (very likely intentionally) by Ackermann, Stearns and Jenal in their 2003 Science publication. I should also point out that the methodology used in that 2003 Science study was an exact “copy” of my method invention disclose in my 2000 patent application which was open to public in 2002 and granted a US patent in 2004 (US6767734B).
In August this year, I wrote to Ackermann and others (including Stearns) to ask them to do some right things for the truth of scientific history and the respect for others’ intellectual property right after I saw Ackermann et al. continued their lie to the world in another publication (Aging Cell 6: 235-244, 2007). However, none of these “scientists” have answered my criticisms or done any right things so far.
Thus, I was very surprised to see that Stearns would be so “upset” with the “plagiarism” he saw in the term papers submitted to him by the Chinese students. If he does upheld a high ethical standard, why would not he do anything moral regarding his outright lie and credit robbery?
Shi V. Liu Eagle Institute of Molecular Medicine SVL@logibio.com http://im1.biz
http://im1.biz/albums/userpics/10001/SE2007V2N3A5_StopLie.htm http://im1.biz/albums/userpics/10001/SE2007V2N3A5_StopLie.pdf
None 4 years, 5 months ago
@ Shi V. Liu, Admittedly, I am not a science major and know next to nothing about patents, and therefore I didn't exactly follow your explanation. However, from your second paragraph, it doesn't sound quite like Stearns plagarized your work, but rather that he disregarded it.
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