Scandal Involves Former Foreign Grad Students

ATHENS, Ohio

To earn his master’s degree in mechanical engineering at Ohio University, Vipul Ranatunga aimed to make improvements to a computer-aided design system developed by other researchers.

In the fourth chapter of his 1999 thesis, the Sri Lankan student described that system in detail. He identified one researcher responsible for it as Zhizhong Zhou, a Chinese student who had received his master’s degree at OU the year before.

Ranatunga didn’t, however, use quotation marks or footnotes to indicate that, with only slight variations, he had taken about seven pages directly from Zhou’s thesis.

Ranatunga, now an engineering professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, acknowledges copying the material but says he didn’t think he was “doing something wrong” because he’d named the author in his text and bibliography.

The lapse of attribution has embroiled him in one of higher education’s largest plagiarism scandals. Acting on allegations made by a former graduate student who discovered the duplicated material while combing through past theses, the 20,000-student public university is taking action against 39 mechanical engineering graduates, 36 of them from abroad. It has ordered them to address plagiarism allegations involving theses dating back 20 years or risk having their degrees revoked.

Professors are under fire for not catching the missteps of students they were supervising. The mechanical engineering department’s longtime chairman has stepped down and a second professor has been told he will lose his job.

A faculty review committee recently said plagiarism in the mechanical engineering department has been “rampant and flagrant” for years, adding that “there can not be any tolerance of individuals who participate in this serious misconduct.” In addition to taking action against students and their faculty advisers, the committee recommended removing questionable theses from the university library.