Memoirs of a Saudi Ph.D. student: Maintaining one’s integrity
@ HatoonKadi justification for the decline in my performance but I did not say anything. Of course, what would have I said?
“Sorry but I just don’t feel like working so please try and understand?” Or “You know, we all should have the option not to work some days, don’t you agree?” Anyway in order to save my already ruined prestige, I just chose to nod in agreement and offered my apologies for my poor performance and promised to get back to my routine self.
He then told me casually that there were several cases of students from different institutions who had been caught cheating. According to him, those students had hired people to do analysis/writing for them. He said that consequences of such actions were very serious and it could cost the student his or her degree. As we have been working together for almost three years and given the fact that we meet on a regular basis and he knows how precisely I usually discuss all details of my work, I knew he was not questioning my integrity, and he also reassured me that he was very confident of my academic honesty despite of my recent glitches, and that I would be able to catch up depending entirely on myself and on his guidance. This incident brought back memories of my Ph.D. upgrade report submission when the plagiarism detection system detected selfplagiarism in my report. Although the plagiarism detected was from a previous work done by myself and not in a novel part of my work (it was in the research context), nevertheless, the issue was taken very seriously and I was told that more grand issues have very ugly consequences and that plagiarism is a very serious academic offense.
The truth is that although plagiarism from previous submitted work is now easily detected, thanks to advanced plagiarism detection systems, but discovering the cases of students hiring other people to do the work for them is a big challenge. The ugly truth is that some of those students are never caught and then they return to their home countries “in case they were international students” with legitimate degrees from prestigious institutions but they lack the qualifications and the interpersonal skills. Some might question that in case of a Ph.D. how such kinds of students survive viva voce? I really don’t have an answer to that question but I guess that they hire other people to train them how to bypass supervisors and external examiners by mastering the work and be trained how to answer questions. It is a very unfair game and some people do it without any shame. People who commit such crimes know that what they have done is extremely wrong. It all starts by opting for the easy way out.
Maybe it worth reminding ourselves that even if such acts might not be caught, but what goes around comes around sooner or later and such dishonesty will never go unpunished, if not now then definitely in the Hereafter.