Most recent print edition: Jan 13

– Last updated: Today

• About Us
• |
• Contact Us
• |
• Advertising
• |
• Submissions

International

Academic integrity lost on students

Stephanie Kwoll - Omega Contributor

“Academic integrity.”

This simple phrase is lost on many international students at TRU and can end up causing them more problems than they would expect. That’s because what’s considered cheating in Canada may not be cheating when abroad.

Different rules in different countries often make it harder for international students to understand what is and what isn’t allowed. While a student may understand plagiarism, it can be difficult for them to grasp the concept of cheating.

The TRU education policy about academic integrity differentiates between cheating and plagiarism. Cheating happens if “a student misrepresents that he or she has mastered information on an academic exercise that the student has not mastered.” This includes copying from someone else in an exam or using unauthorized books and notes in an exam.

For Mexican student Hilda Flores, it was difficult to get used to the Canadian system, especially in regards to the strict citation rules.

“My work at home was copy and paste from the Internet,” Flores said. “[In Mexico,] you can take someone else’s idea and change it a little bit and that’s it.

“We are a little bit more relaxed abound rules in general, not just with school rules.”

Third-year business student Quin Li from China also found it difficult to get used to the TRU rules, as she has never studied at a university before.

According to Li, the citation doesn’t have to be detailed. Only the name and year of a source are important and ideas don’t have to be cited at all.

“I find it very hard to decide which my ideas are and which the ideas of someone else are,” Li said.

Emma Bourassa, teacher at the department for English as a Second Language or additional language said she sees it as a problem that teachers asked students not to plagiarize but do not go into detail about what that really means. “There is an underlined assumption that people have this knowledge and skills before they get here,” she said.

Citation is not necessary for facts or statistics that are so called “common knowledge.” This causes other problems because the definition of common knowledge differs from country to country.

“In an intercultural classroom, there is no such thing as common knowledge,” Emma Bourassa said.

But while there may be confusion with terminology and the concept of cheating at TRU, most cultures aren’t lenient with cheating.

“Our country is very strict at this,” explained pre-masters of business administration student Yasser Fityani, from Saudi Arabia. “When caught in a test, the students gets zero.”

But even though cheating is viewed as illegal in most cultures, it may be practiced more frequently than in Canada because of the high level of competition.

“There are parents who are paying for students to have surgical implants for national exams, The whole family is dependent on the success of that student,” said Kyra Garson, intercultural consultant at the centre for teaching and learning at TRU World.

“In India, we have an annual semester and a final exam that is [worth] 100 per cent [of our grade.] No midterm, no nothing. It is very hard,” said fourth-year business student Vishal Rana.

According to Garson, the bigger problem at TRU is plagiarism.

According to TRU policies, plagiarism is “the inclusion of someone else’s words, ideas or data as one’s own work.” Whereas it is common in most countries to use citation for direct quotes, paraphrasing or using some one else’s ideas are less common to be cited.

Garson said international students do not cheat more but they are more likely to get caught because of differences in the writing style in a text.

“There is the shaky English writing going on and then all of the sudden there is this perfect section,” Garson said. While the writing centre is one source for students who are having difficulty adapting to Canadian academic writing, it’s not the only one.

The ESL department started to introduce the week of academic integrity during the third week of classes. This helps students, but still misses the 60 per cent of international students that go directly into academic courses, bypassing the ESL option.

Garson has introduced a series of workshops for international students about academic writing, as well as a more detailed course that occurs over seven weeks to help students understand the rules.

Her courses target as many people as possible, including the homegrown Canadians.

“It’s not just international students,” she said. “Canadian students don’t understand the rules either.”