Ohio U. accuses 21 grads of plagiarism
Student's discovery prompted review
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Associated Press
Athens, Ohio -- A committee at Ohio University has determined that 21 mechanical engineering graduates plagiarized in the theses they
wrote as part of the requirements for master's degrees, school officials said.
The committee reviewed 46 of the research papers from the past 20 years and found that the 21 contained passages copied from published
materials or previous students' work.
The committee has recommended giving the accused graduates three months to respond and another nine months to rewrite the theses. It
also will recommend revoking the de grees of those who don't comply, but College of Engineering Dean Dennis Irwin said he is considering
more-extensive measures.
"My view is that if someone has plagiarized, there should be something in their transcript or in their thesis that notes that," he said.
Besides citing the 21, the committee found that 16 additional students who worked in groups may have copied from each other or failed to
note group research in their theses.
The committee did not find fault with any instructors, but Irwin said he would conduct his own review into possible involvement by
professors.
The committee was formed after former mechanical engineering student Tom Matrka told university officials in 2004 about suspected
plagiarism he found while reviewing the theses of master's graduates in a university library. He eventually pointed out 30 suspected cases.
Matrka graduated in 2005 with a master's degree and now works as a mechanical engineer in Vinton County in southeast Ohio.
He said the committee should review all 335 mechanical engineering master's theses from the past 20 years.
Irwin said he won't ask the committee to do that.
"It's not good what we found, but it is from the past," he said. "Do we dwell on the past or do we fix the problem and go on?"
Provost Kathy Krendl in March formed a separate committee to consider ways to change university rules and practices to prevent
plagiarism. She expects a report by late this month.
Posted on Thu, Jun. 29, 2006
Professor's term as department head ends amid plagiarism probe
Associated Press
ATHENS, Ohio - The chairman of Ohio University's mechanical engineering department is stepping down, a month
after a university committee recommended he be fired for allowing plagiarism within the department's graduate
program.
Jay Gunasekera's five-year term as head of the department is expiring, his lawyer John Marshall said.
The contract of a second faculty member, Bhavin Mehta, will not be renewed next year, partly because he supervised
some theses that contained plagiarism, university legal affairs director John Burns said.
The school began investigating the department two years ago after a graduate student told officials he found
plagiarized passages while reviewing theses archived in a university library. A committee identified 21 theses dating
back 20 years that contained passages copied from published materials or previous students' work.
Marshall maintains his client was not at fault.
"There has been no real plagiarism. Other than being sloppy, these students were not trying to get away with
anything," Marshall said. "None of the so-called plagiarism had anything to do with the originality of the research. It
was students' copying introductory information leading up to their research."
Gunasekera has led the department for 15 years, supervising a number of the theses identified in the plagiarism probe.
In May, a committee recommended that Gunasekera and Mehta be fired and a third professor be placed on two years of
probation, saying they were complicit in the plagiarism.
No decision has been announced regarding Gunasekera's future with the school. Board of Trustees Chairman Greg
Browning said he expects the university will follow through on the committee's recommendation to fire him. Burns said
the university will decide in the fall after consulting with the rest of the mechanical engineering faculty.
Burns said the school was sending letters this week to the 55 students whose theses are in question, outlining their
options to respond to the accusations.
Information from: The Columbus Dispatch, http://www.dispatch.com
Perceived Plagiarism at Ohio U. By Doug Lederman
http://insidehighered.com/news/2005/11/01/plagiarism
Thomas A. Matrka has his master’s degree in engineering from Ohio University and a good job in the private sector as a
mechanical engineer. So why is he still spending so much time and energy trying to prove that as many as 30 master’s
theses in the university’s engineering college contain unoriginal work?
“They’re compromising the value of the degree of honest students by not distinguishing between the plagiarism and the
honest works,” says Matrka. He has spent lunch hours poring over hundreds of pages of theses in the university’s library
and writing university officials and accreditors on a one-man quest to spur an investigation by those better qualified than he
is to judge plagiarism. “I’m no expert – I’m one guy over there poking around the library. I just want them to look into it
and remove these from the public record, because you’ve tainted all of us by leaving them there.”
The dean of Ohio’s Russ College of Engineering and Technology, Dennis Irwin, rejects Matrka’s view that a widespread
plagiarism problem exists in the engineering program, and says the former student is wrong to believe that Ohio officials
haven’t taken his charges seriously. The college, he says, has investigated the “four or five” cases that Matrka has brought
to his attention, and while Irwin asserts that a federal student privacy law prevents him from discussing details of the
review, he acknowledges that “a thesis or theses have been removed” from the library.
Irwin says college officials have also altered their policies in ways that will improve their ability to monitor potential
plagiarism in student work in the future, including by requiring electronic submission and using software to check new
theses against those previously submitted electronically. But the university has no plans, the dean says, to invest the faculty
time necessary for what he calls a “witch hunt” to review the hundreds of past engineering theses and dissertations in the
library.
“I’m not sure what action I could take beyond the action I’ve taken up to this point,” Irwin says.
Looking for Guidance
Thomas Matrka did not set out to become a whistle blower.
In 2003, 10 years into his engineering career, he enrolled at Ohio to get a master’s degree. He got good grades, but as he
worked on his thesis, he says, his adviser, M.K. Alam, the Moss Professor of Mechanical Engineering, repeatedly expressed
dissatisfaction with his work. (Alam did not respond to requests for comment for this article.) Hoping for insight into
projects that had previously won Alam’s approval, Matrka spent some time in the university’s library in the summer of
2004 thumbing through past theses.
He was struck by what he found. As he looked the papers over, Matrka says, he noted similarities — occasionally blatant,
extended ones — between many of them. He discovered four theses, for example, in which the third chapters on “fluent and
multiphase models” were virtually word for word. Two were from 1997 and two from 1998. Three others, from as many as
six years apart, contained paragraphs and drawings that were almost identical. (Matrka provided pages from some of these
theses to Inside Higher Ed for review.)
“Some of them were so blatantly obvious, where there was page after page copied from one another or from a textbook,”
says Matrka. Some of the overlap is so obvious, he says, that it would be impossible for the professors who oversaw the
theses not to have known about it. “It’s a faculty approval problem,” Matrka says. “It’s hard not to conclude that advisers
condoned this.”
Those are serious charges, and Matrka first brought them to the attention of Irwin, who Matrka says told him that he would
investigate but did not take him up on his offer to share more information (for his part, Irwin says that Matrka gave him
four to five theses but has not offered to provide other examples).
Perceiving a lack of momentum, Matrka says he “went up the chain,” taking his charges to the university ombuds office, an
associate provost, and a number of other officials at Ohio and elsewhere. At every stage, he says, officials either have
expressed little interest in what he has found, discouraged him, or said it was outside their scope of responsibility.
Matrka switched advisers and prepared a project thesis (“Design of an Experiment to Measure Plane Strain Flow Stress at
Elevated Temperatures”) that passed muster; he earned his degree in June 2005. Though he has left the university, his
campaign has continued.
In recent weeks, he has sent packets of materials containing examples of the alleged plagiarism to Ohio University’s Board
of Regents, the Accrediting Board for Engineering and Technology, a national accreditor, and the Higher Learning
Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, which accredits Ohio University as a whole. Last
month he laid out his allegations before the university’s Graduate Student Senate. (The president of the senate, Mark M.
Mecum, said in a statement Monday that it was investigating Matrka’s charges.)
His basic theme is that the university undermines the value of all of its degrees if it does not revoke its approval of work
that has been done fraudulently. As he wrote this month to the North Central accrediting body: “The college faculty has
disregarded its policies and procedures by approving graduate student’s theses and dissertations that contain plagiarism….
The credibility of Ohio University’s students, graduates, and accrediting commission is compromised by Ohio University’s
record of defending and maintaining graduate degrees of students who violate basic academic policies.”
‘We Take These Charges Very Seriously’
Irwin, the engineering dean and the Moss Professor of Engineering Education, bristles at the suggestion that faculty
members and the college have looked the other way either in approving fraudulent academic work or declining to
aggressively investigate Matrka’s charges.
“We take these charges very seriously, as even a single instance can undermine the reputation of a department, a college, a
university, and hence the value of the degree,” Irwin says. “My personal opinion is that the problem that is ongoing is due
to the fact that Mr. Matrka cannot be told what has happened.”
Initially, Irwin cited the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which prohibits the release of personally identifiable
information from students’ educational records, to explain why he cannot reveal what actions the college has taken in
response to the “four to five cases” of alleged plagiarism that a college committee investigated in the wake of Matrka’s
charges.
When pressed to explain how revealing the college’s actions, without names attached, could violate the federal law, Irwin
said that at least one thesis had “been removed” from the library, but that no students had had their degrees revoked, nor
any professors punished in any way. (To the dean’s statement that at least one thesis had been removed from the library,
Matrka says that all of the works that he identified as containing possible plagiarism remain in the university library’s
catalog, and by virtue of its appearance there, “anybody can go to the library annex and pull the archived version.
Irwin says the college has begun “briefing graduate students on the nature of plagiarism, its consequences, and how to
avoid plagiarizing others’ work,” and that it now requires electronic submission of theses and dissertations and a statement
of originality signed by all students. Beginning this winter, he says, the college will “begin using comparison software to
screen all of the theses submitted against all of those we have in electronic form.”
What the college will not do, he says, is ask his faculty to review what could be “tens of thousands of pages” of hard-copy
theses and dissertations” in the library. That could take a huge amount of faculty time for an uncertain payoff, he says, “so
you can probably see our problem in meeting any demand that all instances of plagiarism be removed from the library.”
Irwin adds: “I know Mr. Matrka is not satisfied with our actions to date, but all I’ve heard are accusations, and I haven’t
been presented with any evidence that those accusations are true.”
Part of the problem, the dean says, may be a “different in interpretation between what [Matrka] considers to be plagiarism”
and the university’s own interpretation. With technical works like engineering theses, he says, “there are going to be
similarities, particularly in equations and diagrams.” He adds: “If the same two people worked on the same experiment or
apparatus, it is conceivable that they would jointly develop schematic drawing of that that might be used in both of their
theses.”
Matrka admits that that possibility could explain some of the cases that looked fishy to him – which is why he has
encouraged the university to turn the review over to faculty members more knowledgeable than he is.
But many of the other examples he has identified, he says, don’t require an expert’s eye. “Some of this stuff you wouldn’t
get away with in high school.”
Student Plagiarism, Faculty Responsibility
A review by two Ohio University officials has found “rampant and flagrant plagiarism” by graduate students in the
institution’s mechanical engineering department — and concluded that three faculty members either “failed to monitor”
their advisees’ writing or “basically supported academic fraudulence” by ignoring the dishonesty. The report by the twoperson review team called for the dismissal of two professors, and university officials said they would bring in a national
expert on plagiarism to advise them.
Wednesday’s announcement by the university was the latest development in an unfolding inquiry that was prompted by a
one-man campaign by Thomas Matrka, a former engineering graduate student who complained that his plagiarism
accusations against fellow students went largely unacted on for months.
One investigation by the engineering college’s academic honesty committee, released in March, found widespread
plagiarism by graduate students but did not place any blame on professors, which Matrka said ignored a central part of the
problem.
The same cannot be said of the review that was released Wednesday, which was conducted by Gary D. Meyer, an assistant
vice president for economic development and technology development, and H. Hugh L. Bloemer, associate professor
emeritus of geography and a former Faculty Senate chair.
Their four-month investigation did not absolve the students, noting that “all members of the academic community, students
and faculty alike, are responsible for the integrity and originality of their work.” But they reserved their harshest words —
and there were plenty — for the students’ advisers. They noted that of the 55 graduate theses in which students had
plagiarized their own work or others’, the vast majority were overseen by three faculty members, who “either failed to
monitor the writing in their advisees’ theses or simply ignored academic honesty, integrity and basically supported
academic fraudulence. We consider this most serious.”
Meyer and Bloemer added: “We are appalled that three members of the faculty in mechanical engineering have so blatantly
chosen to ignore their responsibilities by contributing to an atmosphere of negligence toward issues of academic
misconduct in their own department. We are amazed to see that the internal ad hoc committee recommended no reprimand
for those individuals.”
The review called for the dismissal of two of the professors, including the mechanical engineering department’s chairman,
and to bar the third professor from overseeing theses for two years. (The investigators said the engineering dean should
speak with the four other professors who oversaw at least one of the plagiarized master’s theses about what the report called
their “oversights” — the quotation marks were the reviewers.)
Although they directed most of their consternation at the professors, Meyer and Bloemer did not call for letting the
plagiarists themselves off easily. They recommended that all plagiarized theses be removed from the library, and while the
engineering college committee suggested that all of the plagiarists be given the chance to “correct” their theses, Meyer and
Bloemer said the former students should be forced to defend their theses again and to reenroll for at least one credit hour
during that time — paid for by the mechanical engineering department.
The reviewers noted that seven of the master’s students whose work they identified as plagiarized had gone on to get
Ph.D.’s from the university, and that three others were current doctoral students there. The latter should be suspended until
their master’s theses have passed muster, Meyer and Bloemer said.
In addition to releasing the latest report, Ohio administrators also announced that Gary Pavela, the director of judicial
programs and student ethical development at the University of Maryland and a leading expert on academic integrity, would
advise the university on how to proceed with its investigation and its future policies on plagiarism, both to ensure fair
treatment for the subjects of its investigations and to help it put in place policies to stop such problems in the future.
“Academic integrity has to be the core of the institution, and everything we do has to be grounded in that principle,” said
Kathy Krendl, the university’s provost. “We are investigating the situation thoroughly and diligently, arranging internal
reviews, and bringing in a national expert. These are valuable steps in bringing this process to closure.”
Matrka, the former graduate student whose own spade work brought the plagiarism to the university’s attention, said in an
interview Wednesday that he felt satisfaction that nearly two years after he first brought his accusations to Ohio officials,
university administrators were “actually owning up to the full extent of the problem,” including the faculty role. “There was
a lot of reluctance and denial” about the involvement of professors, Matrka said. “You have to admire Meyer and Bloemer
for doing the right thing.”
Krendl said she did not share Matrka’s view that the university had been slow to act. “I think we’ve acted appropriately,
deliberatively and carefully,” she said. “I think it’s a serious issue that we need to continue to pursue, fairly and following
the principle of due process. But understand: There will be sanctions.”