National Taiwan University (NTU) on Friday passed a motion to have students enrolled in graduate or doctoral programs sign a plagiarism declaration stating that their thesies conform to ethics standards and are original, amid a spate of incidents that saw politicians accused of academic plagiarism ahead of the Nov. 26 local elections.
The motion to amend its rules on the qualification examinations for master’s and doctoral degrees was passed in an internal administrative meeting.
The university’s administrators voted to have all students that have passed their mandatory thesis defense sign a plagiarism declaration stating the integrity and originality of their work and provide the results of plagiarism detection software on the document before they can graduate.
Photo: Yang Mien-chieh, Taipei Times
The declaration states that there was no fabrication, falsification, plagiarism or ghostwriting involved in the production of the thesis, and that the student will accept all legal liability if the statement is found to be false.
The passage of the motion formalized a practice that had been adopted by the NTU’s management after an academic ethics review committee at the school determined that former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Taoyuan mayoral candidate Lin Chih-chien (林智堅) had plagiarized his thesis at NTU’s Graduate Institute of National Development.
Following the announcement, the university rescinded Lin’s diploma and degree, leading to his withdrawal from the mayoral race.
He was replaced by DPP Legislator Cheng Yun-peng (鄭運鵬) as the party’s candidate.
More allegations of academic plagiarism have since been made, mostly through media reports or by DPP members, against candidates and members of other parties.
Participants of the meeting also passed an addendum stating that the university’s Office of Academic Affairs must report theses deemed to contain serious breaches of academic integrity to the personnel department, which would then have to hold faculty members who served as the theses’ advisers accountable.
Asked by reporters what would constitute a “serious breach,” academic affairs office head Ding Shih-torng (丁詩同) yesterday cited as an example cases where students’ degrees were revoked.
However, no punishments would be imposed on the adviser if, for example, a thesis was found to contain only a small paragraph copied from other published material, which is considered a minor breach of ethics rules, he said.
In Friday’s meeting, the university administration also passed a motion that stated if a diploma was to be conferred upon a student of a part-time graduate program, it must bear wording that differentiates it from diplomas awarded to full-time graduate students.
The university’s administration said it is necessary to make such a distinction because part-time program graduates often demonstrate superior job skills than those who attended full-time programs.
So far, only 13 of the 25 part-time graduate programs for working professionals at the university make the distinction on the diplomas.
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