Non-award of degree: LHC issues notice to HEC

Degree requirements completed in 2009, plagiarism software introduced in 2010.

RAWALPINDI: Lahore High Court (Rawalpindi Bench) issued a notice to the Higher Education Commission (HEC) on Wednesday, asking for their reply in a plagiarism case.

A software program provided by HEC found that Nafees Mirza’s final thesis was plagiarised. He was studying towards his Masters of Business Administration (MBA) degree at Bahria University.

The university refused to issue him a degree as per HEC’s zero-tolerance policy on plagiarism. However Bahria University itself is yet to define concrete anti-plagiarism policies, which is why the notice has been issued to HEC. Moreover the software used to detect the plagiarism itself was officially introduced by HEC in 2010.

Originally, Nafees Mirza, in his petition, said that he completed the requirements for his MBA degree from Bahria University in 2009. The university refused to award him the degree even though the department had acknowledged that he had completed the degree requirements, he said.

In the last hearing of the case, the university’s registrar had told the court that Mirza was not awarded the degree because his thesis was found to have been plagiarised. The plagiarism was detected through a plagiarism-detection program provided by HEC, introduced in 2010.

Mirza maintains that it is his fundamental right to be awarded a degree after having completed all the requirements, as defined by the university. In his petition, he said that the deputy director of academics at the university had confirmed that all his requirements were complete.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 9^th, 2010.