I stumbled upon an excellent article on plagiarism over at Inside Higher Ed: LINK
Plagiarism is such a deeply rooted and widespread problem in Thailand, I think it deserves its own course for first year students. Most students understand that it’s bad for some reason, but their attitude is basically that they can’t do the work without plagiarizing.
Interestingly enough, most Thai students will immediately admit to plagiarizing if confronted, and the same goes for copying homework or cheating on a test. There’s definitely some good Asian moral richness blended into their transgressions.
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As a side note, when Nam and I were studying at Tenri University, we had a sad, sorry excuse of a teacher (you know who you are and I know you read this blog) who declared that cheating was OK for the Chinese students in our class because it was “part of their culture.”
I could use the same reasoning to turn a blind eye to what regularly transpires in the classes here, but somehow I just can’t let it slide..
Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
That explains in part why lying, cheating and stealing slide over from one aspect of the Thai values and belief system (school/studies) into the other realms of business, money, relationships, etc. In using your Tenri sensei’s rationalization, maybe it’s because they can’t help it…
I never said anything about stealing and actually stated that they are forthcoming about their cheating. I don’t think that these issues in regards to business, money, or relationships stem from any reasons different than those found anywhere else, really – people lie, cheat and steal because they are fundamentally greedy, corrupt, and self-serving.
From the article cited:
In this case, you were asked to “discuss Kaysen’s critique of the medical paradigm in her memoir in light of readings about the ongoing revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual that suggest that our conception of mental illness is not entirely a function of objective biomedical knowledge but also inevitably conditioned by social, cultural, and moral values.”
And to think that some people have the gaul to say that college is a waste of time 🙂
My buddy is a prof and he usually handles it a little bit differently by failing the assignment and requiring that the student redo it (basically requiring ‘A’ level work for an ‘F’). They are also reported to the institution who handles according to their own rules.