Islamabad, July 11: The Higher Education Commission (HEC) has taken a serious note of reports of academic thefts, also known as plagiarism, and constituted a taskforce to curb this menace.
The initiative has been taken on the direction by Shahnaz Wazir Ali, Incharge HEC and Special Assistant to Prime Minister on Social Sector.
The taskforce has developed the plagiarism policy and after approval of the Commission the same was circulated amongst the universities for implementation. Plagiarism Policy focuses on different ways in which plagiarism may appear, its intensity levels, punishment for each level and the procedure to be adopted for such punishment.
Nevertheless, the issue of plagiarism needs to be addressed in holistic manner therefore, HEC purchased an anti-plagiarism service 'ithenticate' in the year 2007 for the purpose of measuring similarity index between publications.
Thesis and research papers and the available material on internet and ten User IDs (accounts) were provided to selected Universities the Quality Assurance Department of HEC has taken a lead on the subject and initiated the process at HEC as well to facilitate the Higher Education Institutes.
The theses submitted by the students at Higher Education Institutions were forwarded to Quality Assurance Department for checking and research papers submitted to R&D of HEC were also checked by QAD through this service.
It is pertinent to mention that during past two years 9, 256 documents were checked by HEC through this service and reports were provided to respective Higher Education Institutions as per policy. The level of extensive utilization shows the significance of the service and trust of stakeholders.
Further, to build the capacity of the universities to detect any plagiarized documents, papers, theses etc at their own, the HEC has decided to purchase & provide anti-plagiarism service to all those public sector Universities which are getting recurring grant from Government. of Pakistan through Higher Education Commission.
The service has been purchased by HEC and has successfully been launched in 60 public Universities on dated June 22, 2009. All faculty members of Universities will get User ID and password through which they can check theses/papers and assignments of their students and papers/written by them as well.
Focal person of each University will be responsible for creation and management of accounts of faculty members and scholars. HEC's role will be of a facilitator for capacity building and monitoring of all stakeholders in case of any difficulty.
This is major step taken by the HEC to eradicate "cut-paste" culture from scholarly works and to support the knowledge extension. The Nation
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