Do students cheat on their Master dissertation?
Yes, in several ways.
1. It is possible to copy almost the entire dissertation from another university. Word processing made this possible, but at the time the internet was not well developed, and these were not typically available online. With non-experimental endeavors like English literature, this is most easily accomplished.
2. Students copy significant portions of other people's work more frequently. When she served as an external examiner, a colleague discovered that sections of her Master dissertation were being submitted as the author's by a student at another university. Things did not work out well in the end.
3. You could pay someone who is more skilled than you to write the dissertation, which would include data analysis. There are people that do this and websites that offer it.
4. Based on your notes in your native tongue, you may hire someone who writes English better than you for a fee. This is typical.
5. Students from specific nations and language groups tend to combine (3) and (4) together. Websites will be in the foreign language when they are involved.
6. Content is occasionally presented as original after being translated from a foreign language. It's difficult to pick up on this.
7. In order to obtain a statistical significance for the desired result, students may choose results, that is, their own outcomes rather than the entire set. For example, to demonstrate that something is more than mere chance.
8. Students might fabricate or "improve" data. It might suffice to only convey the idea of additional testing in order to validate the results.
9. Students may provide findings that they did not independently arrive at or present other people's ideas as their own. These could come from other students in the study group or from resources the student has access to, including firm research records that are not publicly available.
10. Students could write as though they've accomplished something they haven't and forget to give others the credit they deserve. This is made simpler by the writing's impersonal tone. "A written program was created."[By a different student]. "The apparatus was created." [By a researcher from the past or a professional]. "The samples were analyzed by... technique" [by the laboratory that received them, however the student devotes a significant amount of space to explaining this method].
There may be instances where the student is deceiving the supervisor—who is often overworked and possibly less skilled at supervising—or there may be some unspoken cooperation between the student and supervisor in order to deceive the external examiner. It is contingent upon the nation and evaluation methodology. In one instance that I am aware of, the Master dissertation was written by the supervisor and included some experimental work that he had done to finish the investigation. Supervisors whose pupils fail to finish face consequences. These are for standing and standing with research funding providers.
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