(20 Jan 2021) China is ramping up its crackdown on academic misconduct with plans for plagiarism spot checks on undergraduate dissertations, warning universities that they face losing funding or having their right to enrol students suspended if they consistently perform poorly.
The Ministry of Education said that provincial education authorities will sample at least 2 per cent of undergraduate theses completed in the last academic year, which will be run through software platforms and two rounds of review by independent experts. Those found to involve plagiarism, forgery, tampering or ghost-writing will be rated as “problematic”.
A graduate’s degree could be revoked based on the result. The findings will also be used in teaching assessments, subject ratings and the allocation of operational grants for undergraduate programmes. Schools with repeated reports of “problematic” theses three years in a row could be asked to suspend enrolment on the grounds that they “cannot guarantee the quality of their programmes”.
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