The Ministry of Education yesterday said that it was considering measures to instill greater academic fidelity at institutions and preserve the quality of academic papers.
The measures being considered include reducing the student recruitment quota at departments and colleges that fail to enforce academic discipline, and attributing blame to the instructing professor or department.
The ministry has told universities that all master’s and doctoral theses must be transparent and public.
Hopefully, students who do not make their thesis public will become the minority, it said.
The ministry would also publish the ratio of non-public theses at all academic departments across Taiwan, it added.
Oral defense examiners must be university lecturers or researchers of a certain level, and other people, selected for their expertise or professional knowledge, must work with other panelists and do their utmost to prioritize academic professionalism, the ministry said.
It said that it would ask universities to publish their criteria for oral defense panelists and the ratio of individuals serving as oral defense examiners that are sought after for their professional expertise.
If a student’s dissertation is considered to have breached academic integrity, the instructing professor must share the responsibility, the ministry said.
The department to which the professor belongs would also face punitive measures, such as a recruitment freeze, a lower recruitment quota or a subsidy reduction, if they do not provide ameliorative suggestions and measures, it said.
The ministry said that it is planning to purchase systems that can cross-reference academic journals and archived papers for use by universities so that they can more actively investigate allegations of plagiarism.
The ministry’s statement came after Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) member Chung Hsiao-ping (鍾小平) yesterday presented the ministry with documents supporting his accusation that Hsinchu City Mayor Lin Chih-chien (林智堅) plagiarized parts or the entirety of his master’s thesis when studying at National Taiwan University’s Graduate Institute of National Development, as well as another paper when studying at Chung Hua University.
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