Comsats pro-rector’s PhD thesis found 72% plagiarised

The PhD thesis of the Pro Principal of Comsats Institute of Information Technology (CIIT) as well as the CEO of National Testing Service, Pakistan has been found to be copied more than 70%.

The rumors were roaming that Dr Haroon Rashid had plagiarized his PhD thesis however Higher Education Commission Pakistan started to investigate that matter after it received this complaint last month.

The thesis, entitled as “Parallel Scientific Applications Scheduling on Distributed Computing System”, was submitted along with the Preston University eight years back in 2006.

The Quality Assurance (QA) Division of Higher Education Commission investigated the document with the help of the plagiarism detection software Turnitin and they found it to be copied to almost 72%.

After that QA wrote a letter to CIIT Director Dr SM Zaidi “to investigate this issue according to the within 90 days and then asked to share its results with HEC.”

However, the original PhD thesis was submitted by Rafiqul Zaman Khan at Hamdard University in 2004 entitled as “Empirical Study of Task Partitioning, Scheduling and Load Balancing Strategies for Distributed Images of Computing System.”

Haroon has been granted with Sitara-e-Imtiaz in the earlier government of Pakistan People’s Party and he has been working with Comsats for more than 5 years.

Haroon has worked for different public sector organizations in last 35 years whereas 26 of his articles, particularly written in the field of ICT, had been published in different local and international magazines.

On the other hand, the official website of university states that only holds a PhD in Computer Sciences.

The representative of the university said that he had no information regarding any letter of this sort however if there was any then university will definitely take an immediate action against the respondent.

Under the rules and regulations of Higher Education Commission, any person found copying the academic work can be castigated under one of the three categories that are major, modest and minor. Though, the punishment in major cases is the dismissal from the current service whereas the people involved in moderate copying case could be blacklisted and the punishment for the minor is a warning to the lecturer and stopping of all research endowments to him or her.

A physicist as well as the independent researcher based in Islamabad, Isa Daudpota, while giving his comments on this matter said that this is a matter of copying an Indian thesis of 2004 by one from Preston University in year 2006, both of which have the same superintendent, Dr Kalim Qureshi. He moreover said that “this poses many stubborn questions for both Preston as well as for Comsats”.

He was surprised that how Comsats could possibly keep a person at such a high rank without even checking the genuineness of his thesis.

He said that “the starting point of these kinds of issues keeps in the poor policies that inspire the rushed publications, and that were introduced by the HEC when it started functioning”.

He recommended that a complete renovation of this policy along with the strict monitoring of publications is long overdue.