I have had my fare share of encounters with academic dishonesty in various forms, most of them when in grad school at IU and a teaching assistant in various undergraduate or graduate classes.
The first case was in my first year in the introduction to Computing” course (basically a “touch your computer” class, with more than thousand students each semester, introducing basics of MS Office and file management, and a little bit of html). The assignment was to write and format cover letters in MS Word for three different jobs. I had three classes of 30 students, and as I was grading one of the classes, I noticed that one of the letters looked very familiar. I went back to the submission I had already graded, and yes indeed two students had submitted exactly the same letter for different job titles, though. I reported the case, and it turned out that a guy in my class had been “lucky” to find a sloppy disk in a computer lab (yes, that was in late 1990’s when they actually saved their assignment on floppy disks, not on network drive) containing a cover letter of one of my A students, but he had no idea that she too was in my class. What a coincident! If they had been in different classes, no one would have found out. After this incident a system was introduced that checked all student assignments against not only those submitted in the same class but previous years’ as well.
The next one was in the artificial intelligence class, where two students submitted the same code with superficial changes in the variable names. The one code (original) worked, but the “copy” did not. Again, I reported this to the professor, but I don’t think there were any consequences, other than the copier got only partial credit for nonfunctional code … Actually this happened in several assignments — after catching one case I went back to the previous assignments of these two students and found that that they were all plagiarized. Apparently, as the students were not immediately caught, they became a bit sloppy …
The most bizarre case was in the operating system class. For several project the student tried to pass code he had downloaded from the Internet that actually had very little to do with the assignment; it had some superficial features in common (such as use of sockets), but was written to solve completely different problem. Plus that the pieces of code were all in strange languages he did not even know. If that was not enough, he did it several times even after he had been caught once …
And then there is Upwork, an online freelancing platform where businesses and individuals can post (paid) jobs for freelancers to do. I guess there are many legitimate posters, but to me it seems an official marketplace for academic dishonesty. Not only people ask others to complete their course assignments or projects, but also to do literature search and research for their academic thesis. And they are not shy about it! Some of them even submit the original files for the assignments with university logos on them etc.
So, why am I ranting about this? Just recently I found out that I have been a victim of some sort of academic dishonesty. No one plagiarized my work, but I was not given any credit for my contribution in a project in which I worked a couple of years ago. The project involved a dozen researchers and clinicians, but I mainly collaborated with a Master’s student who was the practical lead of the whole effort. The project studied the effect of Omega-3 in self-reported aggression and alcohol craving. I implemented the software and created the questionnaire that were used in the experimental part of the study. It was a lot of work; it took months with tons of changes and additions, revision after revision.
I wanted to include the project in my CV to demonstrate the variety of works I have done. So, I went ahead and tried to find if anything was published on this particular project, and yes indeed there is a journal article published last year and a poster presented in a conference in 2016. The former has ten authors listed and the latter five, even the (then) IT support person is included in both, but not me. Neither publication has any acknowledgment section.
I know that many if not all academic journals have policies on co-authorship, who should be included etc., but I am still contemplating whether I should pursue this case or let it be. I am just sad and mad because of the time and effort spent … for nothing.
PS. What makes me even more mad is that when I “innocently” asked the first author, the professor and the lab lead, for any publications on that study that I could include in my CV, so far he has not responded.