Abstract:

Implementing the lectures and seminars activities on Academic Integrity in Romanian universities, even in normal times, was not easy. In a post-communist country, systematically shaken by scandals over plagiarized doctoral thesis, debates about ethics and academic integrity are difficult. In 2013 was established in Romania the National Agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education, but a comparative study conducted at European level in 2018 revealed that this institution has no control over the violation of academic integrity. The discipline, under the title mentioned in the title, firstly was introduced as a compulsory discipline in the M. Sc. and Ph.D. programs in Romanian universities in the academic year 2018 - 2019 at the express recommendation of the Minister of National Education. It is important to mention that in upper secondary schools students do not have in the civic education program activities related to copyright and intellectual property, respectively cheating and theft of ideas, which makes Romanian fresh students to have a very vague idea about the violations of academic deontology. Romanian universities do not institutionally report cases of student plagiarism. The IPPHEAE survey reported that one of two Romanian students and one of five academic staff have plagiarized in the past. It was not evidence for the conclusion that they would not do it again. In the academic year 2019 – 2020, it was decided to conduct an internal diagnostic survey on M.Sc. and Ph. D. students' perceptions of plagiarism and possible violations of academic integrity. The study showed that most students have a vague idea about plagiarism and believe that it can be excused by roughly quoting the source of inspiration. A significant number of lecture and seminar activities were dedicated to clarifying concepts and developing the skills to recognize others works according to the standards of journals or textbooks in both science and humanities texts. Students were not warned that homework will be analysed for the percentage of similitude using the Turnitin program, but there was a prolonged seminar discussion about its facilities for detecting plagiarism. Students’ homework analysis has shown that the majority of students have become more concerned about plagiarism and that they strive to apply the recommendations. However, there have been isolated cases of attempts of plagiarism such as Copy Paste, Ghost writer, Labour of Laziness or Poor disguise. The final evaluation was organized as a face-to-face discussion with every student. The few students who violated the rules of ethics and academic writing were asked to rewrite the homework in accordance with the rules and validated the exam in the following semester. In this academic year, the development of online course and seminar activities was an increased challenge since the students participated in the activities virtually. They benefited from the same support materials for lectures and seminars and the same series of debates, case studies and text-writing practices were organized. To strengthen the constraints, students were warned that the topics would be checked for similitude with Turnitin and teaching-learning sequences focused on the analysis of texts susceptible to plagiarism were organized. In the paper, comparisons will be made between the results of the face-to-face activities from the last academic year and the online ones from this semester.

Keywords:

Plagiarism, ethics and integrity, online activities.