Nearly 40 foreign students, including Indians, at a United States university are at the risk of losing their degrees for not properly attributing materials in their research.
More than 30 students from India, China, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Saudi Arabia and Thailand -- some even from the United States -- have been accused of plagiarism at the Engineering School of Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. But they are not being accused of stealing or manipulating data.
They are being told that proper attributions have not been made in the sections dealing with review of literature leaving the door open to questions if they were intentional or an issue of foreign students not being aware of procedures in writing Master's and Doctoral theses and dissertations.
The students have been told that proper amends would have to be made or they risked losing their degrees.
At least three of the accused students are now supposed to be in their doctoral programmes in the same University and they have been told to first make amends to their Master's work before they can proceed in their doctoral programme.
The work in question of the various students has been over a 20-year period.
Vipul Ranatunga, a former student of engineering at Ohio University and currently a faculty member at Miami University of Ohio, has been accused of no quotation marks or footnotes to indicate that he referred to some seven pages of a Chinese student who got his Master's degree at the Athens campus.
Ranatunga has acknowledged that he took the material but said he did not think he was doing anything wrong as attribution had been given for the author in the text and the bibliography.
But it is just not the foreign students who are in a lot of trouble. Their professors are also in hot water for not properly supervising -- the Mechanical Engineering Department's Chair has resigned and another professor has apparently been told that he will be losing his job. And a faculty review committee has said that plagiarism in the mechanical engineering department at Ohio University has been "rampant and flagrant" for many years.
'There cannot be any tolerance of individuals who participate in this serious misconduct,' the review committee has said in a note to the Provost.
Thomas Matrka of Colombus Ohio who registered full time at Ohio University was responsible for bringing matters to a head. Unable to get his thesis proposal approved the graduate student used the library to get ideas from past theses when he discovered the plagiarism.
Matrka has been quoted in the media as saying that he was frustrated that he could not get his thesis approved 'and you had students who were cheaters moving on'.
Bhavin Mehta served as faculty adviser for 11 theses under scrutiny. The 44-year-old Indian earned his master's and doctoral degrees from OU and joined its faculty in 1988. Since then, he has advised nearly 80 graduate students.
"They were not really intending to copy. They were just ignorant about those kinds of things," said Mehta, who has not only been told to stop advising graduate students but also that his employment contract will not be renewed beyond the current academic year.
