RIYADH, 4 May 2008 — A Saudi academic has warned students in the UK against being exploited by agencies that resort to illegal methods to get doctoral degrees from British universities.
Anwar Al-Doraihim, supervisor general of the A to Z Group, said in a recent press statement that British universities have devised a system to discover attempts at pirating dissertations after they noticed several instances of students presenting plagiarized theses, Al-Watan daily reported.
Some Arabs in Britain, after presenting themselves as academic experts, offer Arab students help to prepare their research papers for large fees. They then take theses from university libraries, make slight alterations and provide them to their clients.
“British universities, which are uncompromising on academic standards, have now installed a search engine exclusively to scan new research papers and theses to discover if they were same or similar to any existing work,” Al-Doraihim said.
He said currently 10 students from the Gulf countries are under investigation for plagiarizing research papers. He did not say if Saudis were among them.
Al-Doraihim urged the students to work hard and not to be deceived by unscrupulous agents. He reminded them that academic plagiarism was a violation of British regulations and is against the purpose for which they were sent abroad.
