Polish university students are using Wikipedia and “crib sheet” web sites as the main source for their master’s thesis, a new survey reveals.
Polish students thrive on Wikipedia, a source which many an academic (or lazy journalist) turns to for research these days. That Wikipedia is infamously unrealizable is not deterring students, either.
Last year, 54 percent of state-run university students and 72 percent of private school students dug deep into Wikipedia while writing their Bachelor’s or Master’s theses, a survey conducted by Professor Mariusz Jedrzejko at Warsaw University of Life Sciences shows.
Students rely on the internet to an enormous degree. Some 44 percent of undergraduates at state-run universities and about 62 percent at private universities surf the web in search of inspiration and material for their theses. Alongside Wikipedia, the Polish website Sciaga.pl (crib sheet) is extremely popular.
Perhaps there would be nothing wrong with that if students indicated where their knowledge came from. The snag is that 14 percent of state-run university students and 32 percent at private institutions admitted that they copied from the wealth of already written dissertations without bothering to mention this fact.
This qualifies as plagiarism, of course. Sixteen percent of students at state-run universities and 37 percent at private institutions admit they know someone who has bought a master’s thesis online. Eight and eleven percent respectively said they had been offered such a document, while 19 percent and 36 percent knew websites where the writing of a thesis can be commissioned.
Sebastian Kawczynski from the Plagiat plagiarism-busting firm says that this problem is not specific for Poland alone, however. “In the UK and Germany this concerns about 25 percent of all theses. Seventy percent of students at Michigan University in the US, who were asked if they have ever copied anything, said that they have,” Kawczynski told the Rzeczpospolita daily. (kk/pg)