The Faculty of Law of the Babeș-Bolyai University (UBB) in Cluj-Napoca has decided to eliminate bachelor’s theses starting with the 2024-2025 academic year. Grid type exam will replace papers.
A faculty in Romania abandons the bachelor’s thesis – Photo Archive
The Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca has decided to waive undergraduate work for Law students starting with the 2024-2025 academic year, as a result of student requests and problems encountered with plagiarism check programs. Instead of papers, the grid-type exam will become the only form of assessment.
The decision was taken by the Faculty Council after “over 90% of students in one year, respectively over 84% of students in the other year requested this“, explained Șerban Diaconescu, dean of the faculty, according to Edupedu.
Thus, the grid-type exam will be the only assessment students have to take.
The dean discussed the failure of anti-plagiarism programs to actually detect plagiarism, explaining: “We have weighed in on the fact that there is an unfortunate over-exaggeration in the checking of works by anti-plagiarism programs, which unfortunately do not meet the quality standards that allow for a real check for the existence or non-existence of plagiarism.“
“Concretely, in the works of our students, any reference to a legal text, any reference to court decisions is marked as plagiarism, because there is another electronic document in this sense somewhere“, he emphasized.
Şerban Diaconescu emphasized that the problem of detecting plagiarism creates difficulties for both students and teachers: “It put both the student and the teaching staff in extremely delicate positions to do, beyond the natural work that you have to prepare a bachelor’s thesis, an immense work of documentation and justification and to show why it is not a matter of plagiarism and that over 90% of what the programs present there has nothing to do with the notion of plagiarism.“
Dean Șerban Diaconescu explained that the elimination of undergraduate papers was requested by the students, who initiated a survey.
“At their request, the undergraduate thesis was removed. They initiated this effort, not us. They did a survey. More than 90% of the students of one year, respectively more than 84% of the students of the other year requested this. This was the reason why we opted for the version conferred by law and which, by the way, also applies to the University of Bucharest since 2017.“, said the dean of the faculty.
