China to develope polygraph software for academic disruption

A few sources imply that a new polygraph software developed in China will be adopted in some Chinese institutions of higher education to prevent the prevailing wave of plagiarism. This mechanism of this application is to simply compare the subject under investigation with a large collection of literatures in the established database, and check the similarities in words or sentences pattern among them. Even such simple comparisons already have yielded tremendous reactions among the college students. They complain.

This could be well-understood that a large portion of the college students in China manage to cook out their thesis in one or two weeks sitting before the computer doing massive ‘literature research’ and extensive ‘citing’, without being punished or even detected. Things become even handy with the help of search engines. Although certain review process is employed before the thesis are approved, it does not really take effect. It is, however, not to blame the students for plagiarism: they spend most of the time looking for a job. With the gradually increasing number of college graduates and the worst economy recession ever, it is reported that for some districts and colleges only 10% graduates managed to get a job. Furthermore, it is commonly accepted in China that a graduate certificate is just a certificate, certifying that you have accomplished the four-year college life. Normally what people learn in college have nothing to do with their job, and those employees don’t care about that, either. In short, those college students just ‘earn’ a paper of ‘certificate’ so that they could get a job. So it absolutely makes no sense to devote yourself into writing the thesis. Really.

Even though this polygraph software seems to work at the beginning, I won’t expect it to keep the students away from ‘copy’ and ‘paste’ since there will always be tricks to circumvent the silly code. Nevertheless, this is not an exception only happens in China. People always favor those they could benefit. And this obeys the law of nature.