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Student Fights University Over Plagiarism-Detector
(Maly) writes "CBC is reporting that MCGill University has lost a fight to have students first turn papers over to an anti-cheating website before handing them in to professors. The student refused to hand in three assignments to the service, received a zero on those assignments, then fought the ruling. The story doesn't have many specifics, such as the venue of the fight (court or some internal university tribunal), but it is an interesting case. As a recent graduate of the social sciences, I find that practice appalling. The student is right to refuse, as he gets no compensation from the service for making money off his original work (assuming it was original!!). Although I don't like the idea, and I'm glad I never went through it, I suppose its analogue would be mandatory drug tests in sports."
Isnt that the job of lecturers/professors? They're supposed to know the material and recognise when something is copied.
What ever happened to trust?
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Has SCO used this to run Linux through it yet?
It's been poking about a few times, and at least it appears to obey robots.txt and use anti-hammer tricks unlike another IP rights company (albeit tagged to another market altogether) cyveillance who use false user agents to hide their activity, don't look for robots.txt and can sometimes hammer your entire website off the web if you have a low cap (say daily rather than monthly). Kudos to people who build polite bots. Have they been crawling your site?
Technology is seen as infallible by a great many people - suppose a paper accidentally failed the pagiarism test - is there any way to appeal? who are you going to beleive, some snot-nosed plagiarising punk or a godlike magical website?
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
1. This is in Canada, not the U.S. (/. is pretty US-centric, so it seems important to note this)
2. The article does note that, in addition to being used at 29 schools in Canada, it's used in 'several' schools in the U.S. Anyone know of any?
My father works as a professor in a large university, and has often had problems with students turning in plagiarised work.
One day he had to bring someone into his room to tell them that in future, it wasn't advisable to plagiarise from his own book and hand it right back into him, because he could recognise his own style!
With essays that can be purchased over the internet, why shouldn't McGill safeguard against having crap, plagiarized work handed into them? The students who do this are trying to decieve the university. The article seemed to be saying that the professors were trying to just get out of doing work, and it wasn't to catch cheaters. I don't see why it is wrong to know within a reasonable margin of error that the work you are marking is not plagiarized.
The camels are coming. I'm in love.
Does the analogue version make money from the work done by the athlete?
I'm a geek deal wit it
When you treat everyone like a potential criminal, nobody wins.
I wonder if MCGill University has any kind of honor code in place. If you were caught cheating, do you just get a zero on the test or paper, do you get a F in the class, or do you get kicked out of the school?
We use anti-cheating detectors too. Why? Because a) cheating is wrong and should be punished, b) the process is fair - everyone flagged by the algorithm gets a chance to explain him/herself to me.
The owls are not what they seem
I have two takes on this story. First, I do find it a bit offensive to presume cheating on the part of students and to require them to "prove" they didn't cheat rather than the burden of proof running the other way. I do believe that if you expect certain behavior from people and let them know your expectations, then they are more likely to confirm them. This is the same reason that I find the anti-cheating posters in our classrooms at Wright State University offensive -- students know they aren't supposed to cheat, so the posters just create the impression that it's a pervasive part of the academic experience.
Second, that little quip about financial compensation is completely off-base. Students pay to learn, and once the prof has decided that they'll have a better learning experience if they submit to the site (presumably because they will feel forced to think for themselves instead of copying from term paper mills) they have no "right" to compensation. The practice is offensive, but from an educational standpoint, it is little different than the professor using their papers in class as examples for others. Either way, other people benefit from the student's work without compensation for the student. That's the way education works. The fact that antiplagiarism sites make money from their line of business (and the examples submitted by the students) is of no import, as long as they aren't selling the essays as part of an anthology or something. It's a feedback loop within the educational process and even though I disapprove of the practice, nobody's "rights" are violated.
Make cheese not war 8:)
Our department at uni used to run all of the submitted coding assignments in the first year through a script that would normalise the ident style, remove the comments and change all the variables names so they they could be diffed to check for cheating.
No-one threw their rattle out of their pram then.
I mean, how is this different from someone doing it manually?
"If being a geek means being passionate about something, then I pity those who aren't geeks." - Pike65
Anything that calls itself a science in practice isn't.
er... how about science: "Such activities applied to an object of inquiry or study" or "The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena"??? Or are you just small minded?
The website says "Originality Reports are exact duplicates of submitted papers, except that any text either copied or paraphrased appears underlined, color-coded, and linked to its original source." [they check against the internet, academic papers and past submitted reports].
When a subject is quite tightly defined, there must be a limit of permutations/combinations in text. I don't like the idea of this system, but would like to know where they draw the line regarding paraphrasing - is a sentence, paragraph, larger? Is it only exact paraphrasing that is detected or can adjectives be sprinkled about?
Technically interesting, but the false-positive risk is worrying.
--
FreeNET user? Comfortable with the adverse selection?
I am a teacher... And you guys wouldn't believe how much stuff students just copy from the Internet, or from other students.
:-(
It's important to make students understand taht plagiarism just doesn't help them. They're losing a great opportunity to learn, and to develop their writing skills and intelligence, and maybe abstract reasoning, or whatever the subject requires from them. But unfortunately, some of them just don't care -- and these will slowly, er, "contaminate" (sorry, I'm not politically correct - really) the others with the idea that "you just need pass the course". you can learn what you need "later". This kind of system helps to keep things under control (sort of), by discouraging them. I'd be happy i this wasn't necessary, but as far as I see, there's no other option (in particular for people like me, who have classes with 100 students, or something close to taht).
Of course, it's much better if you have just a few students, and can read and detect plagiarism yourself. But hey, nobody wil give me a 10 student class. It's too expensive.
Anything that calls itself a science in practice isn't.
Yeah, just look at "computer science".
The only thing worse than that is coders claiming to be "engineers".
Well it seems the examiner has the right, even the duty to examine the papers which have been submitted. Checking for plagiarism seems fair, and also that he is using technical aids for doing so.
The article also mentions:
"The reality is that the high monitoring of students really isn't about catching cheaters, it is a substitute for hiring enough faculty members to take the time to read student work," said Ian Boyko, national chair of the student federation.
It seems that all the system does is check for plagiarism. Assuming it does that in a sensible manner (not providing false positives without pointing to the reference material) then it's just relieving the examiners from boring repetetive work.
A seperate issue is if they don't just have to have the paper checked, but also integrated into the database. I tend to think papers submitted to the university examiners should be public domain, though.
we could force people to use this service before posting on /., maybe we wouldn't have to wade through so many duplicate posts.
I think that I'm failing to see the problem here... if a student does not submit their essay to this site to be plagarism-checked, what is stopping the professors from submitting it themselves if they believe that there has been plagarism, and achieving the same thing? It isn't about money, because the article mentioned that this occurred during McGill's "free trial" period with the service. Is it a copyright thing?
- c -
If the teacher is truly concerned about cheating and plaigerism, then the teacher/official should be the one paying the service and submitting the works to the 3rd party business, not the student.
The student's obligation is to do the work of the assignment and turn it in. Grading and detection of falsehoods/duplicity/cheating/etc are the responsibilities of the teachers, not the students.
What's next? Submit your work to a business which does the grading?
My site gets hit by turnitin and at first, I was amused. But if a teacher is forcing a student to go through this process, then that teacher is basically saying that their students are not trustworthy and is an assumption of guilt by default.
Shame on the teacher for requiring that of their student and attempting to fail the student. Shame on the school for letting it happen.
Winged Power Photography
All College/University material, regardless of whether it was lectures/notes given or work sumbitted by students is IP of the University, so it can decide what and when to do with it.
At least that's the reality I've encountered so far from all the places I've been to
The fairest policy I've seen (and that is by no means fair IMO) was to declare all work joint IP of the student-College, but the College handles it and decides what to do. The student only has "advisory" rights and gets a share of any of the possible profits arising from the IP.
This means that "His Original Work" is a euphemism and if he doesn't like it, well he should have checked what he was signing when he enrolled. I certainly did.
/. Where the truth
At least in my school we run a program that compairs all the assigments to each other and flags those with "similar" code.
everyone gets a chance to explain and the "flagged" code is examind by the teacher of the course.
A psychopath can't tell the difference between right and wrong. A sociopath knows the difference - he just doesn't care.
Many (most?) schools treat students like a burden. Educate the brats, get them to behave, beat them into line, do whatever it takes to break them and mould them into proper members of society.
If students regularly cheat in written exams, it's a good sign that the exams are pointless. The proper response is to ask "why are students so unmotivated that they don't bother to make an original contribution", not "how can we catch and punish the bastards one more time."
Sadly it's always simpler to turn complex questions into easy "wrong and right" issues.
It's obvious from the Internet that the majority of people can be, in the right circumstances, incredibly creative and original. The challenge is to create these circumstances, not to enforce a dogmatic and broken system of education that students are obviously not interested in.
My blog
As a recent graduate of the social sciences, I find that practice appalling. The student is right to refuse, as he gets no compensation from the service for making money off his original work (assuming it was original!!).
Your arguments are silly, as are the student's motivations. Why burden a teacher with a task that can easily (and a lot cheaper) be done by a computer?
Believe it or not, plagiarism in universities is a real problem, and services like these are successful because of that. This has nothing to do with rights and freedoms. It has to do with problems and solutions. The machine is not grading your paper, that's still the teacher's job, and it always will be.
I suppose you would rather waste tax-money on more humans to do a job that needs to be done anyway.
What if you put quotes around the whole paper - then maybe the computer will be tricked into thinking its a "quote" and the prof wont notice (if the " is in a smaller type) ;)
As for the trial, maybe im missing something but why doesnt the university submit the papers themselves or just have their own internal system?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
No, it's not even close to testing for drugs, being that this plagarism detector is at the collegiate level.
People aren't *always* tested for every event they compete in. They might have random tests by the NCAA or college and they might be tested by the college for suspicion but they aren't tested every single time at every single event.
The point in the article about it being laziness and budget issues by the college not wanting to hire enough staff is ridiculous though. Either a single professor grades the papers or a professor and a grad student do it. What are there supposed to be 2 or 3 professors grading papers for each class?
I don't agree with this particular method being chosen to police the papers... I think that professors should have to grade the papers (for spelling, grammar, and for content -- plagerized or not). If the student has shown issues in the past with this topic then perhaps it should be scrutinized more carefully (even by a commitee) but by a web-based program?
Let's get back to what's important in colleges... TEACHING and GRADING. Stop worrying so much about how much free time you have to work on your next book.
So, a system that prevents people from cheating is good for you if it works, and if you are not cheating. Why? Because the people who cheated won't be counted in the average, and so your score will go up. It's bad for you if the people who cheated would have gotten good grades if they hadn't cheated, but how likely is that?
And in what sense is the site making money off this fellow's work? Are they selling it to other students to plagiarize? I'm guessing that what they're doing is making sure nobody else plagiarizes *his* work.
I don't want to belittle this fellow's feelings, but this really sounds like a case of angry testosterone syndrome - he's identified something, decided that it's an insult, and decided to fight it no matter what. Been there, done that. Hell, I did it yesterday when someone backed a change I made out of CVS. Getting pissed off didn't help. I'd feel more sympathy if, e.g., he'd submitted his paper and been falsely accused of plagiarizing.
It will be interesting to see what happens if this system sees wide use. At some point, at the level of undergraduate papers, it seems like it will inevitably start reporting false positives simply because there isn't really that much to say about any given topic, so once you have a couple of hundred papers on that topic, there's always going to be one paper that's enough like another that it will show up as plagiarism even though it's not.
Bitch - "What ever happened to student teacher trust?"
Answer - It's being violated so regulary by students cheating that teachers wonder if recent degreed graduates really learned anything. Cheating is an epedemic. A student bitching about "student teacher trust" is akin to a speader bitching about a cop with a RADAR gun. As long as the school pays for the pattern recgonition there shouldn't be a problem. As long as the student submitted original work, there shouldn't be an issue. The teacher still grades the work, but he/she at least has a fighting chance to recgnoize if major portions of that term paper were lifted verbatim from a quick google search.
The people that complain about this technology seem to be just bitter that teachers finally have a tool to help them find cheats. Perhaps too many students have gotten use to skating by?
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
They are reverse engineering your writing. Immediately sue the company.
A "Masters of Business Administration" is more accurate than computing gradutes classed as Masters of Science.
They are, however, similar in that both are worthless without practical experience.
After all, the teacher could just require that the student submit the paper electronically, and then submit the paper to the website him- or herself. And then, if it turned out that it was plagiarized, the teacher would have to initiate disciplinary action against the student.
Whereas, if the student submits the paper, and it turns out to be plagiarized, the student has an opportunity to rewrite it without any negative sanctions. If you _are_ a cheater, this sounds like a better deal. If you're _not_, I can see where it would be more than a little bit offensive.
I'm a university student and many times I knew that most professors had code to detect plagiarism. In fact, I remember one that had a code that didn't consider the filename, the function/methods/etc name nor the variable names. He had implemented (in lisp!) something that detected similar program flows.
This was so absurdly over-zealous that I know people who had just one similar (not equal) function and had 0 due to that.
Either way I think that it is only fair that there's anti-plagiarism methods by the professor.
Nevertheless I strongly disagree with these kind of websites (like turnitin) which profit - by ways that might even be unknown to us - with the free work of students.
The teaching staff should do that kind of work and actually read and be knowledgable about the subject the essays are about.
If the professor can't do it then maybe he should go back to being a student.
-- Would it be acceptable to just put my name on my sig?
This tool looks like it benefits the student greatly. If plagarism is detected it looks like it returns that to the student not the professor. Don't /.ers realize that most plagarism is unintentional. I for one used to get all my papers read over by as many proofreaders as possible before turning them in. How is this different than having a TA do a preliminary review? /. :)
As for making money off your work, boy, thats what colledge is about. Get the sheepskin then we'll see what your ideas are worth. Otherwise, you might as well write for
I am a teacher... And you guys wouldn't believe how much stuff students just copy from the Internet, or from other students.
:-(
It's important to make students understand taht plagiarism just doesn't help them. They're losing a great opportunity to learn, and to develop their writing skills and intelligence, and maybe abstract reasoning, or whatever the subject requires from them. But unfortunately, some of them just don't care -- and these will slowly, er, "contaminate" (sorry, I'm not politically correct - really) the others with the idea that "you just need pass the course". you can learn what you need "later". This kind of system helps to keep things under control (sort of), by discouraging them. I'd be happy i this wasn't necessary, but as far as I see, there's no other option (in particular for people like me, who have classes with 100 students, or something close to taht).
Of course, it's much better if you have just a few students, and can read and detect plagiarism yourself. But hey, nobody wil give me a 10 student class. It's too expensive.
The problem is twofold:
First, the accessability of information increases every day - the people who benefit from it are those that stay ahead of the curve. Those that benefit from the status quo fall behind.
The system where you are ranked on your ability to function within an autonomous vacuum is probably going to fall apart, because people in the real world no longer enforce that vacuum. Today's kids synthesize from multiple branches of media in everything they do, and sharing data, information, or anything else digital is second nature.
Judging someone on how well they write a paper is silly, in a world where the paper is already available, and readily accessable. Find something worthwhile to judge them on, and do the hard work necessary to judge them accurately on it, because they won't do it for you. You're laziness will only make more loopholes for them to control you through.
Secondly, todays educational institutions (most of them anyway) are cheap shams of what they once were. Going to university used to mean a period of hardship and disconnection from your old life where you were shaped into a person who cherished academics, tradition, service, honor and culture.
Now, it's the place you go to party for 4 years so you can put something "totally rad" on your resume. These institutions are letting the students down, and in turn, the students are letting the institutions down, and the whole mess is sinking into the sewer.
Innocent Until Proven Guilty?
- cnb
It's frightfully easy to write your own plagiarism detector. All you have to do is write a script to scan the paper and run a few samples of 10 consecutive words in the paper as a search term through google. If for two different queries you get the same site in the google result list, it's a practical certainty that you've found a copy at that site. Chances of someone coming up with the same wording of some subject in two disjoint fragments of 10 words are abysimally small.
Given that most plagiarism happens by copying from the internet (and students usually use google to actually find such documents), you yourself can use google in the same way.
I once wrote a 20-line python script to do just this, and it worked very well. It even found some plagiarism inside a an (awarded) document that was plagiarised.
The student is right to refuse, as he gets no compensation from the service for making money off his original work (assuming it was original!!).
I feel the same way everytime I'm forced to reply to an email at work. Why should Mircosoft make money off my original work? Why can't I just enscribe my message onto clay tablets I make myself.
Everyone seems to think they have some right to profit these days. The nerve.
No, mandatory drug tests in sports is not a proper analogy. A better one would be mandatory soft-drug tests at work places, specially those that do not involve very physically demanding work (programmers?).
As a student, my experience with turnitin has been positive. I'm happy when people who didn't do their own work get nailed. Furthermore, in one class, the prof used the peer editing feature of turnitin. We all got to rate each others work which meant we learned more as we saw how other students wrote their papers.
Tools like this are always reactive; so there's a damn good reason to have it. Frankly it protects the value of my degree. As an employer I would value a school's students more if I knew they didn't cheat to pass. BTW, All of our code goes through a plagarism detector as well (Moss?)
I don't feel as if I'm being presumed guilty and proven innocent (which is what this student claims is his reason); I feel it's a protection for those who don't cheat.
Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that when you attend a university, you have a contractual agreement with the university. And that contract probably permits the university to do this sort of thing. In fact, they probably also own any research results you obtain while at the university and any software you write. Public universities are a little more restricted in the kinds of conditions they can impose on students, but they can impose conditions as well.
I would ask two other questions about this, though. First, if the professor created new, interesting problem sets every year, then students couldn't plagiarize from the Internet, and plagiarism within a reasonable class size should be obvious.
Second, this kind of effort really doesn't need a private company; universities should and could do it cooperatively among themselves for less money. And the software for that isn't hard to write either.
I suspect the reason why it isn't happening is because good professors don't need this sort of thing and professors that do need this sort of thing probably are the same ones that aren't up to setting up large, cross-university software and data collection efforts.
As a student, you have a simple choice: just don't take classes from professors that engage in this sort of nonsense. And if it is part of mandatory courses, either grin and bear it or consider whether your choice of university was less-than-optimal after all.
The problem is that this was a free trial and that the student was forced to submit or fail the class. A class which was NOT a free trial for the student.
Once the "free trial" is over, what are the costs then?
The responsibility is on the faculty to screen. If they choose to use a service, then so be it. The difference is that when the student has to do it, they are basically being openly treated as a criminal.
The turnitin site isn't a "online assignment repository", but a single minded service of finding cheaters. Period.
When you drive down the street and see cops patting down or searching someone on the side of the road, what is your initial impression about what is going on? What is your impression of the person being searched?
Now think about what people think of students who NEED to submit their works to be screened.
What would your initial impression of that student be and would you want to hire that student for your project or your business? Even if they come out "clean" in the end, there is still a stigma attached.
I would personally find it offensive and would be a serious determining factor of whether a school was worth going to or not.
Our airports are already like prisons, now our schools will be as well. What a great time we live in.
Winged Power Photography
Posted by michael on Saturday January 17, @01:16PM from the can't-fight-the-man dept. (Maly) writes "CBC is reporting that MCGill University has lost a fight to have students first turn papers over to an anti-cheating website before handing them in to professors. The student refused to hand in three assignments to the service, received a zero on those assignments, then fought the ruling. The story doesn't have many specifics, such as the venue of the fight (court or some internal university tribunal), but it is an interesting case. As a recent graduate of the social sciences, I find that practice appalling. The student is right to refuse, as he gets no compensation from the service for making money off his original work (assuming it was original!!). Although I don't like the idea, and I'm glad I never went through it, I suppose its analogue would be mandatory drug tests in sports."
Back in school, I used to be the TA for a freshman programming class. To detect plagiarism amongst the students, the professor used to ask us (we were 8 TAs for around 300 students) to submit it to the anti-plagiarism tool. This is understandable.
But to ask the students to submit it straightaway is not cool. Its like saying they are guilty upfront. By default, they should be not guilty.
Free XBox, PS2
It's like schools confiscating nail clippers instead of punishing bullying -- treat the symptom instead of the cause -- because it's easier to do so and gives a (false) sense of control.
The reason being that I'm a programming student and of course my work is similar to others at times. There's only a certain number of ways to do things in the first place, and most students tend to use exactly what they have been taught because it's a waste of time to go out and learn a different coding method to do something that already works.
Firsts0rz :-D
This sentence has been detected as being plagiarised from:
Anonymous Coward
Grade: F-
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Plagarism is worse than simply deceiving the prof at some university. If someone hires these plagarists they are going to find out that they don't know crap because they faked their way through university.
Thus, any university that cares about its reputation would do well to ensure that its graduates have the knowledge and skills that the university claims they have. At some level, plagarism detectors are just a part of quality control for the education system.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
First, is it legal to cross check students' work against publicly accessible sources? The answer it obviously yes, whether using google or an automated service. If anything, the element of automation is desirable, since it reduces the arbitrariness of cross checking only certain students' work.
Second, can you make it a condition of a course that work submitted will be licensed to such a service? Debatable. Copyright normally vests in the student. However, it is often the case that universities require that students grant them a royalty free non exclusive license to use the work for essentially internal purposes. See, e.g., McMaster.ca.
In principle, an appropriately drafted policy, adopted by the university, and made known to students before enrolment, would allow such use. However, I suspect that in this case the policy was never formally adopted by the university (especially given the trial use of the software) and as such amounted to an attempt by the university to unilaterally vary their contract with the student.
On a personal note, just yesterday I failed a student for lifting the bulk of an assignment straight from the web, while not too long ago I had the dubious pleasure of failing another student who paid me the tribute of taking four pages directly from my own text.
I say let the student plagarize and cheat all they want. It's their money and education they're thowing down the crapper. Then, when they graduate and are dumber than bags of hammers, we can hire them to work for us extremely low wages.
I'm a physicist and I can tell you that we don't have right and wrong answers either - only theories.
The owls are not what they seem
Whenever the topic of plagiarism detection comes up, there's always plenty of students who argue that it's offensive to treat them as guilty until proven innocent.
Trouble is, it's hard to tell which students are saying that because that's what they really think, and which students are just copying a response they read on the internet...
Man I wish the professors here used this service. You people have no idea how many college students cheat and copy each other's work. One of my roommates actually uses the same work his brother used 3 years ago when he went here.
Here am I working my ass off because I believe in doing my own work so I can learn while everyone else tries to cheat.
I know I shouldn't be replying to something that is totally offtopic, and since you're an Anonymous Coward you'll likely never see this reply. However, Dernhelm complaint. Eowyn indeed was called Dernhelm. It is the name she took up after disobeying her uncle, disguising herself in the armor, and going to war. The Encyclopedia of Arda can answer any and all Tolkien questions or issues you might ever have.
Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
You don't like the rules and regulations of the University, go somewhere else. If so many students didn't cheat this extreme measures wouldn't be needed. Kids today rather party then do actual work thus you see this kind of stuff.
...but couldn't the student just place a quickie licensing notice on the paper and declare all uses for purposes other than him getting a grade are denied, thus preventing the anti-plagerism service form having the right to copy, store, etc. the document?
A couple months ago, at my college. I had a look at the work of other students who received very high marks for an essay/assignment. My own work being one of them, gaining the 3rd highest mark in the class.
After looking at the top ten, I was amazed at how many of them a lifted work right out of books, and the net. Of the top ten, I could tell right away that 7 (including the two that gained higher marks than my own) of them had lifted line after line directly from internet sites, and books I had read while researching.
Now this is total bullshit, these students are at the top of our class, yet plagiarize from others. Meaning that other students, who are really much better students than those who plagiarize work, are receiving lower marks, and in the future will be considered worse than their plagiarizing counter-parts.
I really like anyway, or thing that can stop this from happening, and make those students who deserve better marks get them.
As long as professors (and students) can go over anything that has been 'caught', and double check it themselves.
The only downside I can see, is if the professors stop looking for plagiarism and rely solely on computer programs to do it for them. Although, from my experience they don't seem to catch it very often anyway.
The University will be paying (probably a lot) to this company to check student papers for plagiarism. So how does the University measure whether it gets value for it's dollar?
Obviously it will look at the number of students who are reported to have plagiarized. If no students turn up as cheating, then either the company's scan doesn't work, or the University's students are so honest that there is no reason to pay for the service.
In either case, the company reviewing the papers has a pretty strong incentive to adjust their software to generate more positives. "Gee, well, we're just trying to err on the side of caution. It wouldn't be fair to the Good Students to let someone through who might be cheating!"
I'd even wager that the company in question has already projected that a certain number of papers will be rejected each year. What happens if they miss that agreed upon quota?
Sorry, but under these circumstances it seems unreasonable to suggest that some 19 year old student can successfully defend themselves against a large corporation that has already been endorsed by the University.
Three Squirrels
As someone writing from Cambridge MA, it seems to me that institutions of higher learning in the US have more in common with thier Canadian counterparts than any other public institution. I don't see any reason why this topic would be treated differently in Canada than in the US. Eh, hoser?
Unlike the book it was a pretty poor disguise, and Merry knew who she was straight away.
Hmmm. I can't really see the point of this anti-cheating thing; seems to me it creates a lot more troubles than it removes.
Using anti-cheating website:
Not using it:
I rather like the way it's handled at my university, where the exercises during the term are not checked for copying at all, and group work, as well as research in the library or online are fully permitted. The reasons: These are necessary skills to survive as a scientist or engineer. What's more, passing the exercises gives you permission to participate in the end-of-term exam. No more. These exams are extremely difficult to cheat in (not least because you need a lot of information, and most methods of cheating have a low data density). Anyone who hasn't acted responsibly and learnt their stuff, perishes cruelly *startEvilLaughter();* Of course, if you're caught cheating, you get a zero on the exam, meaning you wasted half a year (and that's a big chunk of your life).
Divide et impera!
I suppose its analogue would be mandatory drug tests in sports.
Somehow I suspect sporters have less trouble departing of a "sample" of their work, One would have to be really really famous to be able to make money with these things (I havent checked e-bay prices though, perhaps its worth a shot?). Then again, fame and fortune are not garanteed with ones first paper...
I wouldn't have any problem with a professor searching his/her memory to determine if a paper may have been plagiarized, or turned in by more than one student. It seems reasonable for that professor to poke around the internet for key phrases from papers that seem suspiciously well written. If that professor has copies of previous years' papers (which may even be administratively required), it doesn't seem too out of the realm of reasonable behavior to
do some cross-checking when something raises a red flag. So what's the problem with paying a service to do these kinds of things for you automatically? If the problem has to do with the specific business practices of this one service, then that's one thing. But raising some kind of ethical objection seems poorly considered.
Of course, if I asked students to turn their papers in to an anti-cheating service, I would expect those students to be insightful enough to understand that I'm asking them to help me with the extremely difficult task of ensuring that what they're handing in is their own work, a task that is clearly with the responsibilities of anyone who teaches.
To put it a little differently, running papers through a service isn't treating students like criminals. It's treating them like potential cheaters. Which they are. And those are two completely different kinds of treatment. In the same way everyone who goes through an airport is a potential terrorist. I don't tell the airports that I'm offended. I express my understanding that they have to treat me like a potential terrorist because they don't have an intimate personal relationship with me. No one should expect to be trusted by people they don't know well. And frankly, even if a professor knows one or two students in a class well, it's a lot more ethically defensible to just check everyone instead of making judgment calls.
I'd be a bit more offended if a professor singled out my work to check for plagiarism. (Well, first I'd be flattered.) But I'd be reassured if they used a service to check everyone's automatically.
What I really don't understand is if Rosenfeld has thought through the difference between treating students as guilty vs. treating them as potentially guilty. If they were treating students as guilty, they would have kicked everyone who turned in a paper out of the university. Being treated as potentially guilty is something we should all expect, and from which we all benefit. I don't expect a police officer I've never met to just assume I didn't do something because I know I'm a nice guy. And if I were taking a course, I would understand that it's reasonable for the professor, who probably has a recent, short, and not very close relationship with most of the students in the class to treat the students as potential cheaters. They're not singling anyone out. They're just being appropriately diligent at a time when it's finally possible to catch some of the ridiculously rampant cheating.
Now, as an experimentalist, I tend to give personal hobbies like electronics, RC planes/cars, car tuning the same relative weight as the applicant's actualy grades. In other words, if you've been building RC planes all your life but have only mediocre academic success, we'd probably be more interested in you rather than in someone with top grades but no practical hobbies whatsoever.
The owls are not what they seem
The problem is that nobody has the balls to sue the copyright infringing plagarism detector.
They are copying the work, for the sole purpose of destroying it's marketable value. This is very illegal. I hope someone nails them a few times, at the maximum penalty they'll be gone.
Also as a student I should not have to give rights of my work to anyone.
Academic fraud is a problem, but the end doesn't justify the means.
Sounds like a batch of disaffected students looking for a cause to get worked up about. They should consider putting their energy towards a cause worth fighting for.
The reason plagiarism is becoming more of a problem is because it's more convenient, that's the short of it. It's the same reason noone really cared about music piracy back in the days of the cassette tape. It was such a pain in the ass that it was barely a blip on the radar. Now with PtoP it's convenient enough that a *much* larger percentage of people find it worth doing on a large scale.
And so it goes with copying term papers.
Now the music piracy issue can be argued both ways (when one considers the negative effects of the RIAA monopoly on the music industry), but this issue cannot. Assuming these tools are well made and provide references to the supposed original sources, there should be, in theory, zero false positives. If there are any false positives, they can be investigated, but there were baseless accusations of plagiarism long before the first computer was invented, so this is nothing new.
So in this case the only students who have something to worry about are the ones actually plagiarizing. There's no moral high ground here, no more so than objecting to your professor running your work through a sepll-chekcer.
My high school- or at least my english teacher - has started using this. It seems fair to me. As has been said before, there is far too much information for one person to check against on the web; turnitin.com is doing what the user realistically can't. And there is no such thing as a false positive. The site highlights all the material it finds has been borrowed from anywhere; as long as the instructor finds that material is cited, there's no problem. Also, although this is probably a bigger deal for high school than university, this means we now have until midnight to submit our papers instead of until 3:00 (at school). It's also worth mentioning that the system is far from bug free; our papers at least were borked enough than our teacher still asked for a hard copy to grade.
Why might students not want their essays stored in a company database?
Sure, the company could claim the storage was secure against hackers, and they could claim that no employee would ever sell the essays, but any /.er knows that such claims would be hard to trust.
There are probably technological solutions to this problem, involving encryption keys. Folks on /. might have some good ideas on that. For example, how much would it cost, 30 years from now, for a presidential campaign to buy CPU time to break a key that is secure today?
PS. I noticed that the original posting had just one source, and so if folks would like to read more, they might like to check out the Globe and Mail newspaper website for more discussion, including of students' thoughts.
I am a student and this guy is totally wrong about guilty-until-innocent. If I were building an algorithm to detect plagiarism, wouldn't I assume that the paper is 100% original and then match passages accordingly to lower the score? Sounds like innocent until proven guilty to me... If you were doing it the other way, it would be much more difficult to match every passage to make sure it's not in the database yet?
I also don't believe the "Canadian Federation of Students" when they say it grades papers, how can a website that detects plagiarism grade a paper on it's merits when it can only give a report on how original or unoriginal a paper is.
Plus, I'm sure that when a paper may be flagged that the teacher takes a closer look at it and see if it's valid or not and doesn't immediately assume the website is correct. If for example someone properly quoted a line. The teacher would see that a paper has some evidence of plagiarism, and upon closer inspection that the author quoted the passage correctly and gave credit in the proper place, or if the plagiarism is genuine, handle it accordingly
I think this guy is just looking to pick a fight or something, if he had a paper that was original and the site said it was plagiarized and he was contesting it, yeah, I'd like to hear more, but no.
Some teachers, especially at the freshman or sophomore level, teaching classes like English or Chemistry et al, don't have enough time to grade 300 papers evenly and check for plagiarism in them too. This website looks like to me a helpful little guide to teachers to let them breathe a little easier.
Don't try and read between the lines and comment on that because I hate that. If you have something against something I explicitly wrote, then call me out on that and we can talk about it here. Thanks.
I'm a physicist too and I can tell you you're vastly oversimplifying the case.
no-one claims theories represent some absolute truth, but there are definitely right and wrong answers, even if the "right" answers contain some approximations or conditions.
All my students are told that I reserve the right to ask for an electronic version to run through turnitin.com, and that if they do not want to do this, then I will make alternate arrangements. Nobody's asked for alternate arrangements, but if they did, I would ask for an outline and a draft ahead of time.
...'" but his name wasn't Frank, or the highschool student who accidentally stapled a printout of his source website to his paper.)
My own worry about turnitin.com is that they allow students to access the service as a "deterrent", so that students can see whether their essays infringe. Since students should already know whether their essays are plagiarized, the only point here is to submit essays to see whether one will get caught.
Fortunately, most plagiarists are stupid. (I keep a mental list of anecdotes of dumb plagiarists, like the one who turned in an essay by Karl Marx--not just any essay by Marx, but one that was assigned for class reading--or the one who got caught because the essay included words like "My mother always said, 'Frank
Lets suppose that as a student I take some classes out of interest in the subject. Now I am assigned to write a paper for class. I write an honest paper by myself without copying anyones work site all my sources etc etc. Now by the time I am done, I feel I have writen something good of academic value others who are interested in the topic might like to read. I post it to the web. The plagiarism cheking service happens to crawls my site. Days later I turn my paper in, to the prof who runs a check on it. Do I get busted for copying my own work?
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Nice to know. They just check plagiarism. I wonder how many sides has the dice they use for qualifications.
The students are all a bunch of cheaters, we have no other choice! The professors are just lazy, cant they do any work? Everybody is just looking at the surface for some mud to sling in support of what ever they prefer.
It is like the gun issue. There are a bunch of idiots with guns, and everybody focuses on wether or not the idiots should have guns, completely ignoring the fact that they are idiots! We need to reduce the number of idiots, guns or not! Oddly enough, that has a lot to do with education
The problem is, what we currently call education does not inspire people to learn. It starts off as something you are legally forced to do as a child, and then turns into something you are forced to do if you don't want to be poor.
Nobody learns well by force. If you take a smoker's cigarettes and break them, they will just buy more, and be defensive about their habbit. Even less likely to quit. If everybody they know breaks their cigarettes at any opportunity, they might have to quit. But is that the way to teach somebody something? By force? Technically it worked, right?
The problem is, people get sick of it very quick. The reason kids don't like to read is because it reminds them too much of the break-your-cigarettes style of learning. Even a book on something they like is likely to be ignored. Why? Because they read too much in school anyway. They don't even know the difference between learning for fun and learning because they have to. The fire that once burned inside them, making them say "why?" constantly, as they explored the nature of their surroundings, has been put out by busy adults and especially the educational system. You will learn this and this, and you will learn it my way.
I won't bother you with my theories about how I think school should work. I just want to point out that a system that causes people who were once curious and unable to get enough information to want to cheat and not have anything to with it, is a failure and in need of replacement.
It is not as radical as it sounds. We are advancing fast and constantly experiencing revolutions of one kind or another. Lets look at the real issues here. It isn't the gun that is the problem, it is that there are a bunch of idiots holding on to them. Cure the idiot of his idiocy, and less people die. Of course it doesn't end there, lots of other problems are solved when we have less idiots - just think about it. The problem isn't that kids are using the internet to cheat, the problem is that kids want to cheat in the first place. Learning is supposed to be fun. What the hell happened to it?
Seems a good way to remove all the dupes :)
My classes are never more than 25 or 30, and I read all the essays myself. A good student could probably get something by me (however, a good student can generally write something much better than what you'd find on the internet). The weak students (or lazy ones who wait until the last moment) are the ones who can't get away with copying something from the internet.
When a below-average student suddenly turns something in that has a thesis statement, well developed paragraphs, and good grammar, I'm immediately suspicious. Maybe they're just getting some help from someone (technically forbidden as well, unless cited). So I type a few key phrases into Google, probably the same source that they used to find the material to begin with. If I don't find anything but am still suspicious I have the student in and ask them directly. Hopefully my students know that I'm a reasonable enough person that they wouldn't have to resort to such measures and then openly lie about it.
That said, mostly the problem is with younger students who don't know the difference between quoting, paraphrasing, and plagiarism. When I find something that is an ignorant mistake we can usually turn it into a "teaching moment."
Well, I'm writing from Boston, and it doesn't seem to me that geographic area (within the U.S. at least) would matter all that much.
However, Canada is not the U.S. and has a completely different government (something about the definition of a separate nation, there)judicial system and constitution. The original article is not clear on the scope of the 'win' (school appeal or court ruling) but if it were a court ruling, that court ruling would have absolutely nothing to do with anything in the U.S. If it had been a court ruling in the U.S. then it could be referenced in similar court cases as a previous ruling.
If it's a school level ruling, then it's power isn't much no matter what, granted.
But Canada has a different view on civil rights than the U.S. has, as well. Not as different as some places, but that's not the same as not different at all.
Sorry, if the teachers could come up with halfway decent ideas, and marked, this problem wouldn't exist.
When you assignment is "analyse this book" of course you're going to get the same crap again and again.
But if the assignment is "how does this book relate to a recent local news event" you might get something else.
It's a heck of a business model. They spider my sites, eating bandwidth without offering any benefit to the site owners (trivial, until you have a jillion *other* companies doing it too, some of whom don't respect robots.txt to leave graphics and/or dynamic content alone), and they get universities to pay them to increase their database.
Wish I'd thought of it.
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
Well, maybe I was oversimplifying. However, as a physicist and a history buff I took offense at the anti-humanities rant above. I don't know what kind of humanities the original poster was ranting about but I'd rate the "strength" of the right and wrong in physics to that in history.
The owls are not what they seem
I had an Engineering teacher once who was too lazy to make up different tests for his courses every year. He got upset that the IEEE student chapter was archiving student's copies of his tests for use in future years (which, since he rarely changed the questions on the tests, was like an answer key), so he required all classwork and tests to bear a copyright notice with his name and the students' name on it. He specifically told the IEEE chapter that they could not copy his class materials. Faced with this, they stopped archiving the tests, even though they probably could have still archived original copies and just not permitted anyone to make any reproductions.
Of course, a student is in a much weaker position to assert his or her rights, since he needs a grade from the teacher more then the teacher needs to grade his paper. But I'm sure there's more than one law student who was anal enough to try this...
I goto Florida State, and here the school recently purchased a subscription to www.turnitin.com
Teachers are now requiring students to turn in a digital copy of their paper, that will be uploaded to that website and searched for plagerism.
I sure am glad I got those writing classes out of the way early-before the professors used that website.
Whats next, a online submission that will grade you paper too?
With sites like turnitin.com and others sites developing broad databases, students are going back to the roots of plagiarism. They go to the library and copy out of a book. Most books are not in the anit-plagiarism databases. An instructor may feel that the document is plagiarized but be unable to find concrete proof. Instructors have to have hard evidence. A student can always come back and sue the universisty since the rest of their life may be affected by this instance.
My favorite way of catching plagiarizers is when I type the first sentence in Google and the site they took the paper from comes up.
Last term the instructor wanted a electronic copy of everyone's essays since it allowed him to read the papers on his laptop during trips (he was a part time instructor, who travelled a lot)
Anyway, one day I determined he submitted the papers to Turn-It-In, simply by reviewing my usage on my web site, and noticed many hits from Turn-It-In's crawler. I figured it was picking up on my name, which was included in the header of every page on my essay and which is heavily plastered on my web site.
This made me feel like a criminal!! Mainly since I was not told about submitting the paper to Turn-It-In. I never would use someone else's work with out citing it and didn't have much to fear, but just the idea of missing one or two footnotes, was enough to get the nerves going. If I personally had to submit the papers and I was fully aware of the process, I would have ensured every source was cited.
These kids at McGill should have nothing to fear and should not be concerned about the originality of their work, especially if they ARE informed about the process before hand.
Moral of the story.
(okay...I know McGill is in Canada)
;)
Lets get the lawmakers involved and ban academic material from the Internet so that students can download others papers.
I think the way that academic institutions are pushing the Internet towards some sort of academic or research network is not a good trend. AOL and MCI didn't put all this time and money into developing the Internet into what it is today and academia is trying to leach off this.
On the first day, here's how my speech would go:
:)
"... You are more then welcome to cheat in my class. If you do cheat, I will probably catch you, but I am of the philosophy that if you want to fuck up your own life, you're more than welcome to do so. After all, what goes around comes around. You'll pay for it eventually, and the price will be much higher later than it is now..."
The BSD and GPL licenses have been encouraging people to plagarise the works of others for years now.
Just ask Darl McBride - Linux has been plagarizing SCO for quite a while.
In the computer science department at my uni, they scan all source based assignments for similarity with other submissions. You can see average similarity and max similarity to change it before the due date. I don't know of anyone objecting to it.
Since when do we need to pay students to confirm that they aren't cheating? If a third-party makes a profit while determining who's cheating, what's the problem?
If you cheat, you flunk. That's it. No excuses.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
my original anti-humanities post was inspired by the fact that the university education system in the UK is going straight to hell. Tony Blair is pushing for a retarded policy of wanting 50% of school students to go to uni, probably because they've destroyed the value of A-levels so much employers can't trust them to differentiate between good and bad students.
as a consequnce my uni is full to bursting with people doing degrees just to put it on their CV as evidence of the ability to actually do something, then go get a completely unrelated job. funding has already been replaced with fees, which are set to increase even more, and because there isn't enough accommodation, the promise that 4th years are guaranteed on-campus accommodation has been withdrawn and it's even beginning to look doubtful for first year students.
I'm not claiming all humanities are BS, but it's annoying to see that people like me who want to do degrees to then go on to PhD and a career are being financially raped to support the retards who do a couple of years of "American Film Studies" then go on the dole.
as an aside, when I did history GCSE I found it very annoying that we were never allowed to make any kind of judgement - everything always had to be spilt straight down the middle: sources were always reliable in some ways but biased in others; the Cold War was equally USA's fault and equally USSR's; bombing Hiroshima was equally justified and unjustified. I think I lost marks once for saying the Cuban Missile crisis was more USA's fault because the exploitation, invasion, assassination, sabotage etc. was bound to make them want to protect themselves. considering different points of view is a valuable skill, but it seemed too strictly enforced. possibly just PC BS.
That's true in the general case, but if I were you, I'd dig out whatever agreement or contract you signed when you were accepted into your school/college/university and have a good read of the small print. I suspect you may find that you've signed copyright over to the institution on anything that you produce in the course of your studies.
I cannot speak for every or even most academic institutions firsthand. That said, I think this statement is completely false for virtually all universities here in the United States.
I know I'm pretty darn careful about what I sign and I'm quite sure I've never assigned any copyrights to any of the universities I've attended. It's simply not a common or accepted practice. I think most students are not particularly aware of the fact that they have created copyrighted material, but that has no bearing under the law. If a student wants to prohibit reproduction of his/her work, that student can (and does) have that right.
My personal experience has been when I've written material professors wanted to reuse, the've always been quite careful to ask permission. (cheerfully granted of course) Most professors I know are actually quite sensitive to this sort of thing.
While IANAL, I'm pretty certain that absent any explicit agreement between the university and a student, the student retains the copyright to all his/her work. The university would be entitled to material produced as a "work-for-hire", say for example materials produced in a work-study program. But otherwise the copyright remains with the creator. The university would have to get the student's permission to reproduce their work.
Guilty waiting to be proven innocent.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Trust? Students cheat and then whine about trust?? Come on.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Parent post is currently modded "funny". I can't tell if it was intended to be funny, but regardless there is an underlying serious issue: that of on whom the burden of proof lies in questions of guilt or innocence. Both Congress and the Bush administration are systematically orchestrating numerous radical reductions to the legal protections formerly held by citizens. These protections should be given much more care and public debate than they're getting. I sincerely hope that the debate doesn't simply amount to chuckles at strawman positions.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
I applaud technology like this. If you really HAVEN'T plagiarized, then YOU are the one who benefits. Personally, I find it annoying when I do hard work, and end up getting the same/a lower grade than someone who has used someone else's work. Student's cheat ALL the time, and 99% of the time the ONLY one who suffers are the honest students. Class have a curve? All those copies papers that got "A"s aren't going to help you one bit.
Plagiarism is taking credit for someone elses work. Don't do that. Simply quote and give credit where credit is due.
I think what might be happening is that students are being told to turn in a research paper, when in reality, the instructor means a survey paper of other's research.
I remember how intimidated I was by the idea of having to do a research paper. I put myself under an incredible amount of pressure believing that when I wrote a paper, it had to contain real, original, never before seen theories and results.
Ridiculous, maybe, but there were several times when I just gave up and wrote nothing and received a failing grade for the assignment. My A+ became a C-.
If someone had just said "survey paper" instead of "research paper", I could have saved myself a lot of headache.
I find it really disturbing that there is this general mistrust against students there. In most cases a professor/teacher would know the style of the students and if that suddenly changes to a proficient writing style that leaves nothing to be desired that should ring a bell. Yes you could argue that this is a problem when there are new students but I think it should be easy for a teacher to find out the capabilities of a student. And after all if a teacher finds a sentence or paragraph he finds suspicious he could use citeseer or google to crosscheck.
I am sick of all the people justifying the cheaters.
The fact is that the cheaters are cheapening the value of your degree. What you are paying for when you pay the big bucks for the tuition is the reputation of the school. When some dumbass cheater gets out without knowing what they are supposed to know, they harm the school's reputation that is on your diploma. They are cheapenng your degree.
Yes, make all the stupid justifications that you don't need what they are teaching and the assignments are meaningless. You seem to miss the function that universities provide. Their business is not teaching. Their function is certifying that that you learned what you say you did. There is nothing that you cannot learn by just going to the library and reading it yourself and observing the world around you on your own. Their true responsibility begins and ends with putting the grade on the gradebook. Sometimes you get a great instructor that is a good teacher, sometimes you get one that sucks. Luck of he draw. It is not their responsibility to teach. It is your responsibility to learn.
You say that they are using the student's papers without compensation? Any tool that they use to weed out the slackers makes your degree that much more valuable.
Give me a degree from an institution that it is free from the cheating losers. That is true value.
Sounds like many people are missing a key point...
I, as a student, wouldn't like my work being archived to some nameless corporation on the Internet for use in said corporations business model. There's a big difference between my report being checked against other works on the Internet (If I plaigerized it, the material I plaigerized from is already out there to retest against using something as simple as submitting strings against Google or another search engine) and having it archived in a repository by a single business who isn't sharing their archives with others...
HOWEVER
If it is a school where I signed away my rights to "my" work for a course and it belongs to the University, it's their choice what to do with it. Instead of the students having to submit it, let the teachers or University submit them in batch...it's not mine anymore.
Personally, I'd prefer the route of a script or program that would take the source file (my work) and start searching against in-house archives (a school archive of turned-in reports) as well as searching distinctive strings against Google and other search engines. It stays with the University and won't become fodder for someone else to cheat with by being sent over the Internet somewhere else. But that's just me...
You're a fuckhead because you don't even know the difference between "alternate" and "alternative". Go die.
Certainly, catching plagiarists is a good thing for everyone but the plagiarist. For one, it keeps cheaters from blowing the curve and devaluing the hard work of honest students. If more were caught in school, perhaps there would be less bosses that sign their name on an underling's work and only 'admit' it's not their original work when it is not well recieved.
The job of spotting plagiarism is much harder now than it was before the net. When so many successful essays from highschool and up all over the world are available to cheats, no professor can possibly have read them all, even within a limited field.
Before all of that, papers were checked for plaigerism as well, it's just that the check consisted of the professor thinking 'this sounds awefully familiar'. So the checking is not at all a new thing.
What is new there is that the scope of the check has been broadened to match the student's broadened access to successful works. The other novelty in this case is that the check is very up front and obvious rather than quiet and implicit in the grading process.
Would it make a difference if the professor required electronic submission and scripted the submission for checking?
My only concern ios the false positive rate of the checking. I don't know what that rate is, so it's hard to favor or oppose this particular tool. At the very least, any flagged papers must be manually checked. If that's not happening then it is patently unfair. If it is, there is one more hurdle to overcome. If two works are similar, and a human compares them having been told that plagiarism has occurred, they will likely see it, even if it's not there. It will take a great deal of effort to view them in an unbiased way.
One potential solution would be to scan a batch of papers, and return the suspect works AND an equal number of randomly selected papers (but always a minimum percentage of submitted papers), each with the closest matching existant work. Knowing that there is less than a 50% chance that the work is plagiarised could potentially reduce the natural bias to go with the machine generated opinion while still substantially reducing the workload.
As a student, I'm in favor of these anti-cheating websites and would welcome their use at my school. When a student gets by with a plagiarized paper, it typically negatively impacts my grade. By using anti-cheating websites to catch cheaters, my work, my time and my investment is being protected.
Maybe in a perfect world a student has the right to be assumed honest 'til proven a plagiarist.
But in that same perfect world doesn't every student also have the right to know that he/she is on a level playing field? If you don't cheat, great. But isn't it also important to know that you're not competing agaist cheaters? They (the hypothetical cheaters) can't take away from your learning experience, but they can displace honest students in class rankings.
Look up analogous in the dictionary sometime. Drug testing in sports has several functions related to liability. If an athelete is found using drugs, it reflects badly on the team, reducing their fanbase loyalty and negatively impacting revenue from licensed goods. If the athlete is injured because of impaired judgement due to drug abuse, the team loses a player, and their insurance costs go up.
University policies against plagiarism are based on moral grounds, and have little to nothing to do with economics. However, having a third party service do the job is a matter of economics. The service profits from verifying a students work, and their profit is directly linked to the students efforts. Moreover, the service is contracted by the University, which means the student is having to pay for this service as part of their tuition. The issue here is that faculty are outsourcing their academic responsibilities at the expense of the students, and failing to encourage integrity in their students. It is not that difficult to verify plagiarism. All you do is require a student to turn in copies of all their sources, and to utilize peer review to verify sources.
Once again, michael goes on to approve an article submission based in part on the two-bit opinionations of himself and/or the submittor.
Is that we live in a world where university is a cult, you must join no matter what. Employers want degrees, and universities and publishers want money.
Not everyone is cut out for university, and that's the way it should be.
However, with every kid now feeling forced to go to university just to get a shitty job, people are going to uni that just don't have the will or resources to do it honestly, but what choice do they have in a world where a PhD earns 8$/hour and a high school diploma is worthless?
This cheating thing is going to get worse if university becomes a replacement for mandatory military service, which is what it looks like to me. Just a place to keep people out of the job market for a while.
as they should. If you don't like their policies, don't pay to go there. Maybe its different in Canada, cheating seems exceptable there.
This is life - life, love, politics, and business are all about being able to rise above ALL adversity (even cheaters) and still come out on top.
I had someone cheat off of me a lot in high school; in multiple classes. Now, here's the unfair part, because the teachers and school district disliked my father (he had sued the school system) - I got no credit - where the guy that cheated off of me would get half credit. (yes it was proven this was being done)
School/Education nowadays is relatively meaningless. The only way to learn is to self improve and seek enrichment. Few businesses nowadays care about education - they care more about how you produce. If someone cheats on you later in life, you can root them out in subtle ways and know that they aren't producing MORE than you. Cheaters are often ass kissers too. Your goal is to be well liked but free thinking and independent - in other words - like for who you are - not what you say you are.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
I've just spent 20 minutes reading posts looking for something to mod up and resisting the strong urge to mod down. Now I'm giving up and posting myself. There seem to be four main arguments people are making that seem misguided (IMHO).
First, people keep complaining about students having to submit their work to this site instead of the teacher submitting it. This is such a non-point. What difference does it make if the teacher submits it or the student does. It's perfectly reasonable to request electronic submission, and three lines of code can make a paper submitted to the teachers site send it to the plagiarism site.
Second, that idea this some how violates trust between the student and teacher. When you turn you paper in you expect that the teacher will check for these sorts of things. The means by which they do it doesn't change these expectations. Trust is based on a personal relationship. I'd prefer the grading be as objective as possible and be the same regardless of whether the professor likes, trusts, or hates me.
Third. Why does everyone assume that the "originality report" mentioned in the article only contains a binary value. Systems I've used look a lot like the output of a visual code diff (only the same areas are highlighted). The systems flag essays for review and then you make the call whether the specific case is actually plagiarism or just a quoted passages or a coincidence. There is no presumption of guilt, just a tool to make the assessment easier.
Finally, I don't know why no one has ripped this comment from the article apart:
"The reality is that the high monitoring of students really isn't about catching cheaters, it is a substitute for hiring enough faculty members to take the time to read student work," said Ian Boyko, national chair of the student federation.
The papers still get graded so someone reads them. If you hire more people then that means that one person doesn't see all the papers which means that in-class plagiarism has more of a chance of succeeding.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is.
Technology should be used *ONLY* where it enhances human expression. Books, paint, and the internet are examples of various expressive-friendly technologies, for example.
*AUTOMATED* technologies used for purposes of control and regulation are inherently wrong. Such automation grossly assumes a kind of ridged non-humaness in how society ought to function. Automated "anti-cheat" devices for schools, automated red light policing cameras, tickets, and racial profiling, as examples, must be stopped now.
The Custom Mary
I don't know how it works at your university, but at Columbia any work submitted becomes *property* of the university. The logic behind this is that you wouldn't have had the thought or motive to write the paper if it wasn't for the course. Thus, the professor is free to do whatever s/he pleases with the paper, including running it through plaigarism tests (which they do for humanities essays).
Columbia's policy on self-plaigarism is even stiffer: immediate failure of the course(s) for submitting two works with significant overlap (even if it is a different class with a different professor) if you 'self-plaigarize'. That is, of course, unless you get the _permission_ of the _instructors_ teaching the courses involved!
If you ask me, that's a pretty screwed up intellectual property policy, even for one of the most prestigous universities in the nation. It seems that the universities have a built in "backdoor" for allowing your work to become an asset of someone else's business (although questionably).
"I suppose its analogue would be mandatory drug tests in sports"
You suppose wrong. The testers cannot make money from the results of a drug test, this is not true for submitting orginal works to "testers".
Here is a little blurb on stanford's and U of V's policies policies (Taken from here, speaking of plagiarizing :P )
[Stanford] gives students and the community full responsibility of themselves and of upholding the honor law. The university puts all the pressure of academic integrity on its students and it trusts them enough not to cheat so that the faculty is not constantly reminding them of the Code, "The faculty on its part manifests its confidence in the honor of its students by refraining from proctoring examinations and from taking unusual and unreasonable precautions to prevent [...] dishonesty [...]. The faculty will also avoid, as far as practicable, academic procedures that create temptations to violate the Honor Code." (S. U.) Another school where this idea of ienforcementi is put into effect is the University of Richmond in Virginia. This school lets students "leave the classroom during an exam or [...] may even take the exam home" (U. of V.). The professors trust the students because of the enforcement factor. Instead of faculty breathing down the student's neck about cheating, the student knows it is his/her responsibility not to cheat. Millersville University would benefit by adopting this honor code. The students here are trustworthy and would also benefit from the fact that they are trusted by their instructors.
In reality, professors are going to catch plagiarism only if the student happens to copy from a source that the professor is very familiar with.
This is a valid point, no professor will be familiar with all the works out there, and hence will be unable to look at a student work and state that he's seen it before. However, this is not the only way to catch plagiarism.
One flaw in plagiarism is that each person has an individual writing style. Therefore, as long as a class requires multiple essays over the course of the semester, a professor should be able to spot plagiarism, as they should be able to look at the second paper of the semester by John Doe and see that it looks as if a different person wrote it than wrote the first paper. (Of course, this supposes that the professor is only required to teach a reasonable number of students each semester, few enough that he can be familiar with them and their writing style.) I can guarantee you that if I tried to pass off one of your essays as one of mine to a professor who I've had before, they'd spot that the plagiarized essay has a different feel, different words that the author has an affinity for, etc.
Another argument that people might raise against this method is that students may plagiarize all the essays in the course, hence the professor would not be familiar with their personal writing style, but the writing style of their plagiarized source. However, in order for the student to get away with this, the student would need the writing style of all his plagiarized essays to be the same. This would be very difficult to do, unless the essay topics are very generic. If the esay topics are somewhat specific, than it would be difficult to find one author/source that can appropriately answer all the essays. Additionally, if this is a major concern, I would just require ONE of the essays to be in class. That essay would provide a standard for determining each student's writing style.
Additionally, people might point out that in today's litigious world, a professor might be able to spot plagiarism using this method, but not to prove it. However, once a professor spots an essay using this method, then he can begin searching for the source using Google, etc.
I'm going to guess that you're young by your mention of learning Linux and Java in university. Neither technology existed when I went to university. Neither did C++, ANSI C, or Windows for that matter. Computer technology changes and you can't expect to learn most of the technologies you'll use in your career in college.
That's what the theory courses are for--to teach you the aspects of computer science that aren't as likely to change. Wait until you've had a few different jobs, or just think about other students who aren't doing precisely what you're doing. The university can't tailor its curriculum to every student going through, even if your professors were magically prescient and knew just the technologies you'd use in each of your jobs.
Oh, and all those boring theory classes I wasted my time on? Irrelevant. Never have I needed to know anything about calculus, algebra, automata theory, artificial intelligence, declarative programming, or even statistics. Heck, I hardly ever use floats or do anything more complex than i++ in a for loop.
If you're using variables, you're using algebra, so I expect you use it every day. I found automata quite useful when I spent a few years reading RFCs on network protocols, and writing or debugging finite state machines that modelled the protocols in clients or servers. Techniques like functional, declarative, and object-oriented programming all have their place, and I've found them all useful in one job or another. Most programmers don't use a lot of Prolog, but XML DTD's and context-free grammars like yacc are both declarative techniques and I've used both more than once.
Assembly and an understanding of computer architecture was useful when I was doing hardware-centric programming too. I've also spent a fair amount of time doing scientific programming, which covers the rest of the classes you listed except AI, though I've never seen AI as a requirement so I suspect you chose it as an elective. However, I have a friend who writes AI-teaching software, so for her, it was a class that directly applied to her job.
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the fact that if any part of your paper is flagged as copied, the original author's personal contact information is made available to you so you can "resolve the issue." This policy is listed under turnitin.com's "privacy pledge."
Most privacy pledges are of the form "we promise to abuse your privacy whenever we feel like it."
With the increased percentage of American jobs going overseas, I am all for anti-plagiarism systems. These systems will make US education worth more. There will be less idiots slipping through the system without doing any work.
Remember, a college education of today is the high school education of yesterday. I am for any system that claims to increase the worth of US college degrees.
PS. I searched for "grandfather" in the 4 pages of this thread, and didn't see it. I didn't read every message in detail and apologize if this proves redundant.
Mencken had it right. So glad that's old news.
Has anyone here had any experience with getting Turnitin.com to remove your site from their database - and prove that they have done so? We just noticed that their bot appears to have done a complete crawl and sucked in our entire site. This violates our terms of service (not to mention copyright) since Turnitin.com is a commercial entity.
If Turnitin wants to pay to use our content that's one thing, but just taking it for their own commerical exploitation without any compensation is completely another.
First, as most any professor will tell you, there are plagiarism-friendly and plagiarism-resistant assignments. Ask your kids to turn in an essay on what they did last summer, and you'll be flooded with rip-offs. Ask them to write about a specific and interesting question, relevant to the content of the course, and they will simply have trouble finding an essay to buy that answers the question.
Second, those profs who *have* to ask generic, plagiarism-friendly questions will be much better at identifying rip-offs than some for-pay service. More often than not, a cheater's paper sticks out because the content or the style jars so badly with what he has turned in previously. When a student who has turned in nonesense up to this point turns in a perfectly lucid paper, I am immediately suspicious.
But what if, you say, the professor has so many students that he can't get a feel for their writing? Well, this is a problem. But the solution is to fix class sizes, not to hire a private company to run regexes at a huge markup. The kids in the article are exaclty right: this program is about reducing the number of professors McGill has to hire. Not about improving the quality of student work.
What's good for the syndicate is good for the country. --Milo Minderbinder
Hard to tell if trust is the real issue or if your first comment was more telling. One thing for sure, I'm getting seriously tired of this republican attitude of guilty until proven innocent. And that bubbles over into a lot of areas. Check points on roads that inconvenience everyone to check for a few people who have been drinking. Drug testing is another great example. Invade everyone's privacy to weed out few bad actors...one that strangely hasn't affected the actual level of drug use in this country. Software activation inconveniences everyone looking for a few pirates, and where is the payoff? Activation was supposed to lower prices to the consumer. Anyone seen lower prices? So that was bullshit. The DRM arguements are recycled bullshit. Finger printing and photgraphing millions of people looking for a handful of terrorists...more bullshit.
Guess I'm wondering when we started to just accept this crap as part of the program? Have we turned into such pussies that we feel those things are somehow okay?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I think people might be blowing this out of proportion just a tad. For my college English courses, as well as psychology courses, I was told to use turnitin.com to process my papers beforehand.
The whole idea of the site is to make sure that you are quoting your sources properly. That is all! If you haven't used proper source quoting, then your paper will be returned letting you know what you did wrong.
However, the site can be abused by instructors. You see, using the above method of working with the site, the instructor can set up the number of times you can submit a paper. Most professors will set it up so that you can submit a paper two or three times to make sure everything is sourced properly. However, if a professor only lets you submit once, then I could see how using the service could be a bit like trying to win the lottery if after all the computer decides you didn't quote properly without giving you a chance to fix it.
Even still, the bottom line is that the site is designed to make sure you're quoting your sources properly, not necessarily to check if your paper is an exact duplicate of someone else's.
the only anti-turintin argument I've seen that has any merit is that they're making money using students' work, without the students being compensated for it.
Unless I give explicit permission otherwise, the only person who can make money off my work is _me_
The high school I go to uses TurnItIn.com, but so far we haven't had to actually turn anything in using it. What interests me is that there are dozens of schools that put TurnItIn class usernames and passwords on their websites; I've created a TurnItIn username that is enrolled at almost 50 classes around the country. I've even created a teacher account at one college foolish enough to leave that info on an easily-Googled Web page. Ahh, stupidity...
I meta-mod all positive moderation Unfair, because it's abuse of the system.
During my MBA, I knew one guy who took his OWN paper and rewrote it to adjust the topic for each new class. According to wha tI am reading here, it would have shown up as a false positive each time after the first.
At the 2 Universities I attended, no copyrights were granted by the students to the University or to the professor. With American copyright law, it would not be. Therefore, turnitin.com is breaking the law in using papers from many American Universities.
As for writing style, talk about bullshit! AS students in high school we were taught ot write "this way" which would give all of us a similar style.
I'm glad that both my degrees occured before the advent of the internet.
I remember being asked to submit a paper electronically once. I happily compiled by printing the paper, and then scanning it at low DPI into a PDF file without using OCR. They couldn't say anything because they asked for it in 'electronic format' without specifying further.
Dupe checker on slashdot = good
/.)
Dupe checker in school = bad
wha?
*does the "double standards are fun!" dance*
(PS. I know they're different, but it'd be the same tech, and IMHO dupe checking for essays is *more* important than dupe-checking on
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
The article says that the reason why Rosenfeld didn't submit it was because he didn't like the 'innocent until proved guilty' idea. However, that was not it. Turnitin.com works by keeping all essays submitted into the database, to keep the database growing. Rosenberg was also protesting the idea that his orignal work will be helping a company (A US company, no less) get more money. This this equally as important in his protest
that's a very good point
you never plagurize for an A or a perfect grade you make a hodgepodge of many and make it look half-assed that way you end up below the suspicion level
For the simple reason that the educational establishment is responsible for itself. Children and teenagers do not run schools, they have no real voice, and rarely any power.
I'm not suggesting that young people know what kind of education system they need, but it is obvious that it is incredibly inefficient to teach people by force.
This discussion should be easy to settle, by taking a poll on how many people believe their education was 'optimal'. I've asked this to many of my aquaintances and I get about one positive answer for about four negative ones.
But... if you think a school should be a place of rules and discpline, with metal detectors and security guards, you have the right to send your kids to such a place.
My blog
Last time I looked, the college itself is making money off other people's work in general, and your only compensation is a diploma (assuming you finish).
I'm unaware of any prohibition of the schools making a students work public, though they may have to take pains to make sure the author's name is removed. So if they put this work on the web, aren't search engines making a profit off this work? That is a battle that has already been fought and lost.
All of that is an aside. The college takes on the roll of an employer here, and has full rights to whatever works you produce. When I was in college, I constantly heard grumbles (far more justified) about professors assigning graduate students programming tasks that the professors would collect and string into marketable products. At the University of Illinois professors are allowed to profit from side projects, though this is not true for all universities.
As for fear of false positives, that would be a legitimate complaint if the plaggerism detector merely turned back a yeah/nay response. The article says it returns a fitness number of originality. I would assume when the number gets too low, you the teacher can request the most offending example that it was supposedly plagereized from. Now it becomes a human decision again, by comparing the two papers. I would also imagine this side by side check would only be done on students whose papers consistently come back with low fitness numbers. Assuming this is the way it is applied, I don't have much of a problem with it. The alternative is to just realize that good plagerizers will get the same grades on essays as everyone else, now that so much searchable material is available on the web.
Letter To Iran
My teacher for network administration is a rejected high-school math teacher, my teacher for programming is an ex-KEMA ( product testing and qualification corp ) employee. My teacher for Windows NT system administration ( don't laugh ) is a former Greenpeace sysadmin. *nix sysadmin teacher is an ex-marine. All these people changed job to teacher in the last 5 years. So, are they experts regarding their subjects and teaching, then?
Thats one shitty school.
I'm pretty sure the prececpt of almost ALL academic ventures is that it goes into the open domain. Once a professor publishes a paper, it's made freely available for use provided that you make the correct citations.
Here, you can consider a students work part of the "public domain". Once you right it, it's fair use for other academics to cite it, or reference it. "Turnitin" just provides a cross referencing service. They aren't "selling" your paper. It's like doing a public records search.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
TurnItIn accepts PDFs. I believe that if you create a PDF that is just made up of images of the pages of the report, they don't OCR it, thus defeating the system.
I meta-mod all positive moderation Unfair, because it's abuse of the system.
I have been a teaching assistant for over 3 years and it is no secret that plagiarism is a fact of life.
The problem is that the assignments handed out are overly broad. Instead, I believe the solution is to significantly narrow down the problem, so that it is more or less unique. You may find it on the net, but u'll spend more time getting it to conform to the requirements.
For e.g., instead of asking for the effects of globalization on world economy (or some such thing), ask them for effects of globalization on THEIR life. u get the idea...
Maybe having the professor run paper though the site was catching "too many" people? Having the student run the paper through the service gives them the opportunity to make sure they haven't plagiarized anything "unintentionally" before it becomes a major issue.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
A lot of the programming classes at umich have projects graded by an autograder -- specifically you run a script to submit your code, then it compiles it, and runs a bunch of tests to make sure the behavior is right. One of the features of this system is that it checks your submission against every other submission (even past semesters) for that project to see copied pieces of code, even detecting stuff like copies with renanmed variables. And of course every year, we'd hear about groups of people getting caught with all-too-similar code, all with the same set of bugs, etc -- obvious offenders.
I went through this class after class, and it was never a problem for me, because although i trust myself not to cheat, I don't trust others. If other people are getting the same grades as I am without any of the effort, then the grades mean nothing, because they don't separate people based on what they know. Now, sure, my stuff was all programs, and their stuff is papers or something, but in the end what is the difference? The kids that refused to submit their stuff are just spoiled brats looking for attention, and not focused on learning anything.
-S
When I post my paper on my personal website, and then the service says I plagarized myself, what happens? =b
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
And because of your aspirations you have more of a right to a university education via taxpayer expense? I've worked in the academic environment for quite awhile as a support person, and I'm here to tell you the majority of doctorates I've seen over the last ten years are nothing more than leeches.
They generally abhor teaching undergrads and then attempt to procure grants to pursue any number of follies errr research with the financial resources of others, most of which will amount to nil.
So, once you get that doctorate, how about getting a real fucking job?
How exactly do I write something original?
A blog I run for the wealth
OK lets do some maths here...
So calculating from the student's point of view they are getting about an aggregate 2.5 hours worth of individual professor and TA attention per year. What a deal at somewhere between $8,000 and $25,000!!!
(1) Explain to me again why an online degree is considered less worthy than paying a boat load of money to get drunk on campus. Wasn't it because of all this "individual attention" students were suppose to get?
(2) At the 10+ percent this industry - and let's not kid ourselves that it isn't an industry - raises prices every year, how long before we see hundreds of campuses spring up in India catoring to consumers looking for a better deal?
Leave the gun, take the cannolis.
I actually attend this school, although studying in management. I'd be curious to see what deptartment is using testing out turnitin. Although now that they lost in court, I doubt they'll continue since any student will be able to refuse.
When you pee in the cup, what Intellectual Property are you giving up for free? None.
It used to be that learning was a serious endeavor, between a professor and a student, a master and an apprentice. Your final exam was an oral one, and the purpose was for the professor to determine whether you had absorbed the material sufficiently, and the result was a pass or fail for the student.
As testing becomes more mechanized and impersonal, it opens the door for fraud of all sorts. You can try to stem the fraud with technology, but nothing can stop a student from hiring an expert to write an original essay for them, or even a thesis.
If society really cares about the quality of the output of universities, then funding should be improved, class sizes reduced, and a more personal approach taken to teaching. Automated fraud detection is not going to save the university, in fact, it just shows how much in trouble it really is.
They do frequently claim ownership of the physical medium (the paper or exam itself), and a right to use the work in an academic context, but the copyright most frequently continues to reside with the author (as is proper).
I don't know why people plagarize. You pay to be at college, you pay for each class. If you cheat, you're just wasting the money you (or your parents) spent to send you there. Additionally, just a couple citations and quote marks transforms a paper from plagarized to innovative, original work. Stop being so damn lazy!
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
As I can see it, I return my paper to the prof and because I have the copyright to the paper, it cannot be stored by some for-profit-company unless I license it. Perhaps I should hand out my paper to the prof with a written license that he can use it as required for grading it but the paper may not be redistributed. If this web service doesn't allow comparing the paper without adding the content to their database, then the prof cannot use this service. If, on the other hand, the service allows checking papers without adding the content to the database, I can see absolutely no reason why the prof shouldn't be allowed to use the service if he feels that it's the most effective way to work. If the professor or the university pays the bill, of course.
_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
If a school wants to run its papers through a service like turnitin then that is fine. I don't really care if they use a service to find cheaters. There are so many cheaters in colleges it would be nice for those of us who are honest to have a chance again. I was recently in an exam and the professor left the room for a few minutes (his fault I admit) and instantly everyone was asking for answers from each other. And in several cases this year I was offered money to other people's work. Obviously they found someone to do it.
My real problem with turnitin.com is that they collect a database of papers from those submitted and those published. They are using original works of others without permission or compensation and making millions at it.
I am starting to add a copyright notification at the end of my papers specificly prohibiting their storage in turnitin.com's database.
yes I believe I should have more of a right. I'm doing a degree because it's the only way to get into the profession I want. people who are doing degrees just for the sake of being able to say they have one are a waste of resources.
Even if you had signed an agreement to this effect. You are essentially giving them something for nothing. Ownership of your papers goes to the university but you are not compensated in any way. Your education does not count because you pay tuition and fees for that. It is a contract without "consideration" for the student, so even if that guy was right which I am quite certain he is not since I know I never signed any contract with my evil university and they are exactly the type of place that would try this sort of thing, therefore the contract probably would not be enforceable.
Just run it through English to some other language then back to English again. Oh sure, you may get marked off for bad English, but they sure as hell won't figure out your source!
Example from turnitin.com's own site:
Turnitin took once to a plagiarized test the 100% word by word. He was of course already suspected, due to the professional quality extraordinary discharge of the writing. But really it helped saving the effort "to obtain the test."
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Unfortunately for the submitter, this sort of things appears nowhere in the CBC article. Yes, the paper is compared to other papers submitted. How one gets from that to 'gets no compensation' is such a thin reed as to be ludicrous. To continue in the own submitters logic, it would be like Olympic atheletes refusing to submit urine samples because they don't get a cut of the testing labs income.
It may well be that the submitter knows more about this case or the student than is visible in CBC article. But as the moderator notes, there's so little detail in here as to be useless. The editorial comments simply further that uselessness.
See this is a case where having smaller classes is once again a better idea In high school my english teacher would know in an instant if someone hadn't written a paper because after a few in class essays she had some idea of our writing stlye. I know in colleges this might not be so practical, but that just makes me glad i go to a smaller school (classes of 20-30 instead of 100-200)
In todays age, cutandpaste is the main way to write papers. Most students don't or will most likely not step into the university library to research the material in books, magazines etc but will cut and paste from the internet. In my day, one had to do the research and use a typewriter to do the paper. Moreover, you were also graded on the whiteouts and cleanliness of the paper, smudges etc. Today, its laser printers with color
and graphics. I'd think graphics would not be allowed but that one had to do it the old way.
One of the problems with cutandpaste, is that when one does use a sentence/paragraph almost verbose, but doesn't properly quote it, that one could be accused of plagerism. This could be a mistake on the students part due to forgetting/mistake to include a reference quote, or that the student says its only part of phrase and thus quoting it in their judgement could be skipped since it is so minor that just about any reference or source could have stated the same thing due to its commonality or status quo.
So how do you grade a paper when a student makes a mistake like this.
if the professors need a site that probably re-sells the essays to cheating websites or individuals, then they should be fored because they cannot do their job, god, they should go back to the public school system where teachers are expected to do that shit.
Now I'm usually a big supporter of personal rights and so forth but I simply can't see how this inconvieniences anyone let alone violates their rights.
First of all anytime you hand in a paper it is implicit that you give up certain rights to that paper. For instance, I don't think anyone would claim a prof. shouldn't be allowed to keep a copy of all papers turned in to later compare for plagerism. How is this really any different?
So what if a prof keeps a copy of every paper turned in to him and then highers a grad student to check new papers against the stack of old papers. In this case someone is clearly making money off of the papers (the grad student) but I still don't see any evidence of a rights violation.
Would it suddenly be a violation of rights if the department or the university maintained a file of all papers instead of the prof. I can't see a problem here, in fact I think many departments do engage in this sort of policy. Would creating a seperate administrative unit in the university which pays grad students to compare papers suddenly make this a violation of rights. If the university makes agreements with other universities to merge their plagerism checking effors is this a problem?
It seems all that has happened here is that the prof/university has subcontracted out the process of checking for plagerism (or at least the first check). I don't see any difference between contracting with a company or paying a graduate student.
Of course to be fair the company which detects plagirism should be prohibeted from using the papers in any other manner (selling them etc.. etc..). However, whether or not they actually include this guarantee in their user agreement practically this shouldn't be an issue. After all who would want a term paper you know is entered into an anti-cheating database?
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Students who hand in their essays automatically give up their rights to their work to turnitin.com. This company is assembling a massive database of content, which can then be turnd around and sold to businesses for big bucks, without giving credit to the students who created the material. These guys are worse than the RIAA is when it comes down to compensating the creators for their efforts.
I absolutely hate TurnItIn.com, but sadly many teachers at my school use it. I have never cheated in my life, but as others have mentioned, I feel I have to prove my innocence.
I'm wondering if I have legal grounds to sue them, as every paper I have submitted to them has had the following attached to the bottom:
Copyright (C)2003-2004 (My Name). All Rights Reserved.
Any unauthorized use, reproduction or storage, either electronic or printed, in whole or in part, without written or verbal permission, is a violation of international copyright laws.
Permission for TurnItIn.com and/or iParadigms.com to retain a copy of this work for more than 14 days, or to incorporate this work into their database(s) is explicitly DENIED.
They have terms and conditions people automatically agree to when they use TurnItIn.com, it would seem my terms for them receiving my papers would be valid, as they will obviously ignore them and retain my papers.
and would you believe a I had an instructor last term who showed up unprepared for lecture but projected an online version of the textbook onto a screen in the front of the room and tried to speed-read it as he lectured with his back to the class?
So would the instructors agree to have all of their lecture notes pre-processed by the same plagerism software so that the schools and students know they're getting the original instructional resources they paid for and a copy of readily available material?
...and can clear a few things up.
Firstly, the use of Turnitin.com is very rare at McG. In fact, the prof for this class is one of only two profs in the whole school that make using the site mandatory. Apparently this prof is the only one that thinks we're all rabid cheaters.
Secondly, although the article dosen't say it, the case was won in a domestic McGill instiution. As of the fall (when this was big news), the saga of Jesse Rosenfeld had moved beyond the negociations with the prof, to the point where he was about to file a J(udicial)-Board complaint. Seeing as the J-Board, however, takes somewhere in the matter of a year to get anything done, it was time for another round of negociations, this time between Jesse, the prof, the departement, and Student Advocacy which got the solution.
Oh yeah, and this was after five or six articles in both Campus papers, as well as the backing of the Undergrad Student Society and the Postgrad Student Society.
So way to go Jesse. Although I'm personally not a fan of you, you won one for the little guy.
Cue The Sun...
In Sweden there is an analogon to this service: Urkund. They offer the possibility to the student exclude your file from public access. Only your home school//college/university will have access (this is regulated by the law). They also mention that your copyright is not affected.
Well, I must admit that I welcome that my university has begun to use the service more frequently. For me, there is no excuse for cheating sutdents.
To the world outside, especially to someone who wants to hire you, a degree is a proof of your knowledge. So they don't have to check with you in person, whether you know anything at all (often, they don't have the knowledge themselves).
It's like certificates for commercial websites: Do you accept their pledge to be trustworthy, or do you want to see a valid certificate?
Excellence: Moderate (mostly affected by comments on your karma)
Even more disturbing is the fact that these cheaters, when caught, get nothing more than a slap on the wrist. They are not kicked out of the school, the department or even the major. They are sent on their way with a note made on their "permanent record."
I'm quite sure that cheating is just as bad in other departments/majors as well. Something should be done about this.
Here is a related article from the Globe and Mail and a response that suggests it is the same as random drug tests. It is NOT the same as random drug tests. http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TP Story/LAC/20040116/ESSAYS16//?query=McGill
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TP Story/LAC/20040117/LETTERS17-5//?query=McGill
Turnitin.com has a legal opinion they had written up to explain the issues with what they do. In the opinion they admit that some aspects, particularly the archiving and the commercial (for-profit) use of other's work is not necesarily covered by fair use.m ent.pd f
http://turnitin.com/static/legal/Legal_Docu
warning pdf file, your eyes may bleed.
The problem is at least two fold:
1) The testing company keeps the submitted essay and then uses it to test further submissions. They are now using the submitted essay for their own profit, and the student is effectively forced to allow this.
The equivalent drug test would be where the blood/urine sample has a value on a secondary market and the original owner loses the right to dictate how this sample is used.
2) Also, there are many procedural issues that relate to plagiarism that make the issue worse. It has been defacto at McGill that if you submit group work and one contributor has plagairised - intentionally or not - then all members of the group are held accountable. Teams often divide work for efficiency. To then require that every team member vet every other member's work is simply impossible in theory and impractical in general.
The equivalent drug test would be to ban everyone on any team that has had any member fail a drug test. For people caught in this net, the heavy-handed practise feels unfair and indefensible.
For people with professional standing (e.g. accountants) this has long reaching impact far beyond some elective where a team member missed citations.
In practise, it can seem like the guilt by association with a death penalty.
Couldn't this service theoretically set up a sister site that sells the papers that were submitted into the anti-cheating service? This has the added benefit of increasing true positives as people start submitting the essays they had bought from the same company.:P
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
I guess it's OK for Cyveillance to harass everyone else, but we're not to harass them. :-\
I avoided this whole debacle and self taught. There's nothing in a University system that can not be found outside. They are delapidated institutions riddled with hypocrisy and inefficiency whose only purpose is to line their own coffers with your parents money and whatever grants or 'donations' government and special interests care to give them. The only thing Universities have to offer is resources and peer review. If you plan to be a biochemist or nuclear physicist you're out of luck, otherwise you don't need anything more than a normal consumer grade PC and some motivation as resources. Peer review? Find some semi-intelligent friends, you'll be better off than what the University has to offer.
The truth is that unless you're a lawyer or a broker you won't be making enough money to need a degree/piece of paper until you're 28-30 years old... no matter what. Strangely enough that is when you're also old enough to be taken seriously as an adult and profs, administrators, etc won't be a quick to try to push you around. So if you really need a degree graduate or post graduate, wait until it counts.
Ultimately my advice is to go out and make $15-$20 an hour doing something you really enjoy for awhile, take people on balloon rides or push them off a bridge with a bungie attached, there's no need to get stuck sitting in a desk while you're in your physical prime... plenty of time for that later.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
These people give me the creeps.
I maintain and host a website for a group of people who make and sell rosaries and prayer beads. The site includes very little text; what is there includes descriptions of the pieces and the odd prayer or scriptural reference.
Turnitin has been crawling the site for months. I could prevent it (according to them) by adding them to the robots.txt file. But they're decidedly not interested in holding any philosophical discussions. (Why are you crawling this site when there's no original text here?? Do you care? Or do you just operate some kind of giant maw that chews data and students and spits out the mangled remains?)
I keep worrying that some hapless student somewhere will cite a scriptural passage, prayer, or whatever and become the victim of some massive and impersonal vengance due to Turnitin combined with professorial ignorance.
I seldom say anything "against" teachers. But when I was producing term and research papers, there was an assumption that the professor or instructor actually read them and that he/she was literate enough in the topic to ferret out any bogosity.
This ticks me off especially when I consider the massive tuition bills that students (and their folks) are paying now. Apparently all these gigabucks don't entitle the student to a careful reading of his/her work. As I said, Turnitin gives me the creeps.
Anne
DUCT TAPE: The Election Supervisors' Secret Weapon
Give me a break. This is not such a big atrocious deal. Plagarism is appallingly rampant at colleges and universities today - it's even worse in high school and middle schools these days. People shouldn't steal someone else's work and turn it in as their own without proper citations. MLA is not that hard of a citation format to follow. Mistakes happen, especially in college when one has to write a paper after, during, or right before partying. A mediocre professor can see the difference between honest mistakes and an honest attempt at stealing. People just don't want to get caught doing what they know they shouldn't be doing.
If you are an English, Philosophy, Poly/Sci, and etc. major, this should not be a problem in the least bit. Original work is your goal - I have a feeling that people who really like their majors and the writing it requires of you would not care about having to submit papers to the service. Getting published is your goal anyway and people are going to go over your work closely no matter what. I have a feeling that the "101" people who are just taking a writing class to fulfill a requirement are the one's bitching. In a intro class no one expects genius. You don't need to be original, just don't steal. Is it really so hard to parse a few sentences together that are your own?
Getting back to the service itself, if anything it should be adopted not at universities (where supposedly you are PAYING money to GET an EDUCATION), but instead in public high schools and middle schools. That is the place where this type of plagiarism really needs to be nipped in the bud. A lot of teachers on this level don't have the access or are too over burdened by student load, cash, etc., to have the time to trawl through the net like their students. My Father was a high school english teacher for 25 years and now teaches on the middle school level. He happens to love computers and the internet and is constantly catching students trying to pass off work as their own. It's pathetic. But a lot of teachers don't have that kind of computer savvy, or at least knowledge.
You can do a lot with a computer. I remember back when Prodigy was the main online service and I would use it's encyclopedia & etc. to help me write reports and stuff. I remember thinking how easy it would be to just use the info. Having always had a computer (I'm 26) I was unique back then. (With my Mac Classic I even used scanned images taken with a logitech hand scanner to spice up various reports). Now, any kid can do stiff like that and so much friggen more.
So yes. You are guilty until proven innocent - but who cares. Trust is something that is earned anyway, and if this is the way students toady have to earn it, then so be it.
I think every CS major already knows about this. We have been doing it here at my school for year now. Wonderful apps like Moss do agreat job of finding people who have stolen other people's work
Move along, nothing new.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Too bad!! There is no law that says just because you created something and gave it away you must get money for it. Unless there exists an original contract between the parties that promised such payment. Which there wasn't such a contract in this case. Just a whiney student's immature wishes and subsequent tantrum.
First off: The professor CAN do what he did and make it a requirement that all student's work be submitted to anywhere and in any manner he wishes. If the students fail to adhere to the rules (as arbitrary as they might be) then zeros CAN be given. If the student finds the instructor's policies unacceptable then they can always take the class with a different instructor, take a different class entirely or even switch major or institution.
But actually the reality is that the student does sort of get a payment for his work. Its called a grade. If he accumulates enough decent grades we award them a bonus called a degree and that is one very, very valuable asset for younger people these days.
This is not about "fairness" to provide students with only policies they like. Come on... All of us had more than one professor in our academic career that we found to be unfair, biased or just a plain jerk with stupid policies. Just because we didn't like the policies didn't mean they got repealed or changed. There is no law mandating student's approval every policy that they are subject to. Besides what jobs do you know that enforce only policies that the employees like? If they did then every company would go bankrupt in two weeks. (See Dilbert's "flextime" fiasco).
And if you want to talk about "fair" is it fair to hobble instructor's ability to catch cheaters? (And let me tell you, they exist in large quantities). No, because there are students that actually make the effort to do the work and they are not being treated fairly if other lazy, unethical students who cheat and cannot be caught are awarded the same privileges. This fairness is of far, far more importance.
Yes. I am a university faculty member. Cheating is a big problem. maybe because degrees are so essential to success these days and effort seems to be on a decline. The Internet and modern technology has provided cheaters with resources and methods that are nearly impossible for instructors to thwart. There is nothing wrong with what the instructor in the news item did. The student, if they don't like it, can cry all they want. Or they could mature a little bit. I would suggest the latter as being the more productive and successful solution.
However, I will backup the argument in favor of the student if the instructor failed to: 1) explain in the course syllabus that submitted works will be filed with the anti-plagiarism service or that other, non-specific anti-cheating methods would apply to submitted works; or 2) The instuctor verbally explained, clearly during lecture that this policy was being enacted and why. (And then I would even allow that this explanation should have been given prior to the last day allowed to students to withdraw from the course without receiving a grade a "F").
Pick on my grammar all you want; I'm not an English professor. ;-)
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
It's similar to classes with compulsory attendance. Those kinds of measures always seemed to me a tacit admission that the class wasn't worthwhile enough to justify coming to so students had to be compelled by some other means. Anyone paying the prices that a college education today requires should expect more value than a class with compelled attendance, or untrusted honesty. It's the same principle in both cases.
that your high school English teacher was an idiot.
Just working from your original text, I can find three word clusters like "about which a," "go so far," "in addition to," "as to say," "may well be," "this is not."
Given the definition provided by your teacher I would say that "many students could be falsely accused" is a bit of an understatement. I would be surprised to find a single paper that would fail to meet these criteria.
lysergically yours
IANAL, but to me this looks like a clear breach of contract. When students pay to take a class, the deal includes an evaluation by the teacher. Otherwise they are merely auditing the class, which they can usually do for free. Simply marking the work with a zero is not an evaluation, at least not by any competent definition. Students who have paid to take a class shouldn't additionally be required to forfeit something to an outside vendor in order to receive a grade.
Come to think of it, the anti-plagiarism service seems very parallel to what record companies have been doing for a century. Musicians don't don't make money from record sales because of the expenses that are routinely deducted from their royalties, leaving zero. They get a chance to achieve fame while the record company makes money from their work. Students get a chance to achieve a good grade, and the anti-plagiarism service makes money by adding the students' work to their database without having to pay for it.
I said Cambridge because there are a lot of Universtiy Institutions here. Havard and MIT are just two of many. In that sense, we both are likely to have a bit more knowlege of various educational institutions than other geographical. The article doesn't mention anything about government involvement, which led me to assume it wasn't a court level ruling. Also does Canada have more "liberal" views on privacy rights? The tone suggests they might, but I'm not clear what the difference might be.
You're probably right about most not being very clever, but your argument's still has classic type II (beta) error; detecting there's not a problem when there is. aka not rejecting the null hypothesis
I think there is a significant difference between a university using scripts to check for cheating and a commercial entity that acquires the right to use students' Intellectual Property.
In the former, the university does not make any money. In the latter, the commercial entity gets the right to use the students' papers to further the commercial entity's profits.
-- mzungu
It's not a public nuisance issue, it's a public v private communication issue. Posting a letter sent to you is valid since it's not only intended for your viewing (and you to do what you like with it) but it's not compelled. Papers are an interesting position for the student; only a fool would suggest that papers for university aren't compelled; if not by your grade than in the wider world the financial benefit of getting a degree. The fact that these are compelled writing doesn't mean students should cede their copyright on them. The previous posts are entirely right. The issue is entirely about the database created without students *voluntary* permission (sure they give access, but it's hardly voluntary), not about if plagiarism checking is a good {or at least a necessary-evil}.
It would be interesting if universities required students to place papers in some kind of international repository. This would be searchable, and could be read (and used as a reference). It would also serve as a marvelous plagiarism detector.
May we never see th
Can we stop the Slashdot editorializing? I mean, look at this story. The first half is very fact-oriented and neutral. It presents the case in question, the student's views and his initial punnishment. Do we need the poster's opinion as well? That is the sort of comment that should be reserved for the COMMENTS section, not the main article...
anyone else agree that we're seeing this much more recently?
Just ran http://www.catb.org/~esr/comparator/comparator.ht
One poster had the right idea: present the paper as a scanned PDF image -- sure, a little more work for both parties, but not overly burdonsome to either [not even to the prof -- acrobat reader may take a long time to load, but not much longer than word...] The downside is that this can still be "OCR'd" from the images
I'd suggest taking it a step further: submit the paper using the professor's "public key" -- that way, ONLY the professor can decipher it. If further copies "magically appear" in turnitin's database, well, you have a pretty good idea who the culprit may be...
Actually, just as a side note, maybe this is a GOOD use for some of the new "features" in a palladium-ensconced version of office: you, as the "author" of the paper, can explicitly forbid copying and perhaps even the ability for turnitin to "read" it... (of course, turnitin will just look for an open source version of a DRM cracker... :) )
I submitted this story yesterday, in fact before the CBC was even covering it, citing CTV's coverage of the same story.
The point that a lot of people seem to miss when I tell them about this is that it's not about whether or not you're cheating, it's a matter of a university presuming your guilt. I know that when I submit work I've put my heart and soul into it, and I don't appreciate being treated like a criminal. Furthermore, I don't want people making money off of MY work unless I get paid dividends for it (and I consent to it in the first place). The vast majority of students are not "cheaters", and these sorts of systems generate all sorts of false-positives. "Better to let 10 murderers go free than to crucify one innocent person."
People who say "Well I don't care because I don't plagiarize" are missing the point entirely.
When life gives you lemons, you CLONE those lemons, and make SUPER-LEMONS. -- Dr. Cinnamon Scudworth, Ph.D
and have him write them a nastygram demanding payment.
Best Slashdot Co
What marketable value? Or were you planning to sell it to other students?
Best Slashdot Co
The Google folks (who are frusterated with automated scripts that hammer the bajeezus out of their search engine, trying to let result spammers figure out the ranking of a given page) have said on their policy page that if you're beating up on their servers with an automated system, they can ban you.
Now, they don't seem to to it lightly. I've written a couple scripts that use Google, but I also put some limits on the thing -- one second delays between searches and the like.
May we never see th
Given that any non-State school is a business, and most State schools charge money to students, what do you think is going on now?
Best Slashdot Co
how is that [printing then scanning low-res] making it difficult to mark? Just print it out.
That what professors are supposed to do. They're not meant to submit students' work to some money-making dot-com, just to show one of their asshole, shithead students is trying to pull one on them.
Students pay the astronomical salaries of lecturers and professors, as well as financing their pet projects.
Who cares if they plagiarise some time wasting shit you make them write out every year? Sometimes I wish students took action every time a professor used copyrighted material without permission.
Bloody uni lecturers' egos couldn't take that... the dirty fucks.
This is even more OT (less trollish):
I have a friend who marks management tutorial assignments. The kind that are worth 5% each. He is directed to never give a mark less than 8/20, no matter what, lest it lose the department that student's fees.
It's all corrupt.
turnitin has a pretty interesting analysis of whether they infringe on the copyright of the student who submit the papers.
I believe this would violate FERPA
FERPA (Family Educational Rights & Privacy Act, 34 C.F.R. Part 99, Subpart A - General Sec. 99.1) prevents an institution from disclosing or publishing a student's written examination or paper without prior written consent.
Some how I doubt these universities got written permission from all their students
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
I graduated with a CS degree a couple years back and I would say one third of the graduates in my major were regular cheaters. These guys would routinely copy other people's code while they were not looking, or sometimes even form groups were one of the ten members would actually write the code, and the others would copy...they would take turns so everyone in the group wrote something at some point, kind of like buying rounds at a bar.
We all graduated and the cheaters are the ones that are either unemployed or have very shitty jobs where a CS degree isn't required in the first place. They have degrees but most programming jobs screen potential employees with some kind of test to make sure the applicant knows how to program. The cheaters will fail these test, and even if they pass and get hired, they won't last long when management sees they are useless. The hard workers are the ones now with good companies getting payed a lot of money. I never turned in any of the cheaters because I knew they were digging their own graves...but its a shame that their parents all spend $60,000 so that their kids could go to a good school and learn next to nothing.
I was thinking the same thing. If I submit my paper under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial 1.0 Licence, then it can be read by whomever, and checked for plagurism, but cannot be included in the database for future financial gain on their part. If they ignore it, they are in breach of the license, and I can sue them for money they have made since my paper was added to the database.
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=2, Troll=1, Redundant=1, Insightful=6, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=12. (not mine)
Forgetting everything else for a moment:
The worst thing about it is the guilty until innocent approach that seems to have been taken. When you have be accused to have plagarized, you must PROVE and EXPLAIN how you didn't. Thank-you democracy.
If you wrote your paper, you should be able to explain your non-cited observations and arguments. If you can't, then maybe there is something to their claim.
This is slightly off-topic, but academic misconduct is a large problem that Universities must deal with. As a college student, I am fully aware of the problems, but unfortunately, I have no real solutions to offer.
Let me start off by saying that I believe cheating is too generalized of a term. I prefer to differentiate the word cheating into two distinct branches: academic misconduct, and academic dishonesty. Almost all students, at some point in their collegiate career, commit academic misconduct. For example, many of the following fall under academic misconduct depending on the professor or the course: comparing solutions with other students, working together in groups on an assignment, assistanting other students in debugging programs or circuits, using exams and assignments from previous semesters to study, or using instructor's solutions manuals.
I myself compare solutions with other students, but only after completing the problem on my own. I often work with other students, simply because I find that it is easier to learn when a group of dedicated students support each other. Everyone learns differently. But I believe that if a students does these things in a sincere effort to learn the material, to maintain academic integrity, then it is certainly excusable. I think that students often forget that the struggle of mastering a topic is as important, if not more important, than the final answer obtained.
And this leads to the issue academic dishonesty, which to me, is the most disheartening form of cheating. In short, academic dishonesty is claiming work as your own when it is not. This form of cheating gives students an unfair advantage over other students. And sadly, I see this all the time. For instance, many experiments in Microelectronic Circuits Lab take anywhere from ten to fifteen to hours to complete. I have seen students simply copy data from students who took the class in previous semesters, and even go as far as to turn in their reports verbatim! And to think that these people will one day have the same degree as me! Perhaps more disturbing, last semester I was offered monetary payment to do a student's programming homework for Communication Networks. I refused, but I think the experience forever instilled a certain hatred in the University academic process.
I think that despite its problem, this is one the reasons that I support automated cheating detection systems, as long as the results are then verified by a professor or instructor. Cheating is so rampant that is difficult to prosecute all but the most obvious of cases; and these are typically failing students anyway. It is the students who make straight As as result of academic dishonesty who are the most difficult ones to catch. And unfortunately, the latter kind is all too common. I hope that one day things will change, but until then, everyday is a constant reminder that dishonest students will graduate with me when I graduate next semester.
Titus Barik
Hi!
I'm an adjunct lecturer at a local university, and I've seen the growing problem of plagiarism at first hand. The Internet provides students with massive amounts of material--in many respects posing a real problem for the school library, which is inevitably hopelessly out of date on a lot of subjects. And, as many people have pointed out, the Internet provides students with lots of material to use in plagiarizing--turning in someone else's work as their own.
All of which has NOTHING to do with Turnitin.com.
There are a couple of different business models in the plagiarism-busting business. One model (best exemplified by EVE (Essay Verification Engine from Canexus Software) selects potential search hits from an essay and then hits search engines to see if the content can be found on the Web. Turnitin.com doesn't do this: instead, it compares submitted papers to an existing database.
The difference is business models is quite clear: the web-search tools (EVE) are focused on selling to the individual instructor who (like me) smells plagiarism but doesn't know where to look. If you get a paper whose English is simply too good to be believed, just fire up EVE, feed it the paper, and then have a heart-to-heart chat with the student and/or the dean. Turnitin.com, by contrast, really markets to an entire institution--it is squarely focused on dealing with a more serious academic problem: organized cheating. They're not busting you for copying two paragraphs from the CIA World Factbook: they don't compare your paragraphs with the web. But they can, and will, bust you for recycling a fraternity brother's A- essay for your Survey of European History class.
This is more than just nickel-and-dime copy-lifting
This isn't just lifting a paragraph from a good essay without using a footnote. This is out-and-out, undeniable cheating. Something that sends normally laid-back faculty members up the wall is to raise the notion of organized cheating: of groups of students (often fraternities) that maintain files of successful papers. (When I was an Ivy League college freshman, decades ago, the quality of a fraternity's essay files was a prominent feature mentioned when rushing a freshman.) The practice isn't just limited to fraternities--there are entrepreneurs around who will sell you a "guaranteed" grade on a paper; they can guarantee the grade because they know what grade the paper received a year ago. And, of course, there are the commercial paper mills that have turned cheating into a business. (And yes, Virginia, that "original" paper they sold you has been used for dozens of previous customers.)
How Turnitin.com works:
Turnitin.com works by comparing submitted papers against other papers that have previously been submitted. They stress that they don't just want papers that are suspected of plagiarism: they need every paper. That's because the original, appropriate, well-written, deserving-of-an-A paper you've just finished (and you have finished your homework, right?) might get submitted again next year in a different section of the same course. (And if you're wondering, it is not unheard-of for a teaching assistant to make a few bucks selling good papers.)
That poses a business problem, and probably the biggest marketing problem Turnitin.com faces: faculties don't like requiring every student to submit every paper to Turnitin.com. Small schools like to think they have a close relationship with their students, so they tend to doubt that their students cheat. Big schools with 100+ student sections have few illusions about cheating--but balk at the cost.
Cheating happens.
Plagiarism happens. It is a real threat to the academic process. It is a real threat to a student's education--and a real threat to that student's future. (If a doctor cheated on an essay in college, who's to say he actually attended that seminar on laser surgery? Do you want him using that laser on you?) My school doesn't see the need to sign up for Turnitin--but a number of faculty members do use it, and others use EVE or other similar tools. It's a real problem, and Turnitin is one legitimate solution.
As an undergrad, I did submit the same paper (entirely original, save for a ten-word epigram properly identified) to four different courses through four different semesters. Never got caught.
Sure, that's just a sign of how bad the school was (and I got away from them) - but would would that be punishable?
That may be true, but I surmise you could still refuse to have your paper submitted to their database by enforcing your moral rights.
I am not sure about the U.S., but in Canada you maintain moral rights, that is, the right to refuse your work to be used by others for purposes you find immoral, for life. These rights cannot be given or sold even if the original copyrighted material is sold to another, they are exclusively the author's.
Perhaps someone who knows more about copyright in Canada could comment.
frist dup3?????
On many occasions i have had to hand in papaers to anti-plagiarizer services, generally I did this without much thought. Now this made me think about it for a sec. It seems to me that the students problems would be something along the lines that the company is making money of the papers they hand in, so the analogy to the drug testing is not really correct. Im thinking that this is a problem because it is well with in the students rights to not hand in the paper to a web site. Mainly because the action of submitting the paper would most likely hand all their rights to the paper of to the website. Now that I have a problem with. For I may not want to have my paper in their database generating profit for them, and also in handing over my right on my paper. I have never seen one of the reports you get from turn it in sites but I assume they would show you where else the text is found. In order for them to do that legally the would have to have permission from you to use your paper, and last time I check I shouldn't have to give that permission to any one but my teacher/school. The solution to this is simple students have the right not to submit their paper, and the school also has the right to closely scrutinize the paper with its personnel.
I am a senior at Univeristy of California - San Diego. I was forced to use the turnitin.com system on several occasions. Having served my time in the university system, I have seen many students get away with cheating. As a student with something of a (imho) high moral code, this drives me crazy. I think cheating on a test or plagiarizing a paper is reprehensible. As an electrical engineer, I find it important that all other engineering majors believe in the same ethical code (such as the ieee code of ethics) - because cheating in the real world can lead to disastrous consequences.
Turnitin.com serves two important functions: to prevent plagarism, and to catch plagarism. In my writing classes, a few students (knowing that we use turnitin.com) plagiarized anyways. These idiots rightly deserved to be punished. On the downside, a friend of mine (writing a paper at 5am) forgot to use an endquote (") when citing something. She was marked for plagiarism, received an "F" in the class, and has that label on her permanent record. However, in that incident I find the administration to blame, not turnitin.com.
The honor system is a great ideal, but (at least at UCSD) it is not followed. Turnitin.com is not invasive, it simply ensures that people do their own work (and therefore the grading curve reflects students' actual achievments). They profit slightly by adding your paper to their database, but at least that way nobody can plagiarize your work- doing a service to you. BTW, no grading what-so-ever is done by turnitin.com - the web-service returns information on sources of text- not style of writing or anything else. TAs or Professors still do the grading - they will just know that they are grading an original work.
I think this Rosenfeld guy is a big whiner.
It seems to me that most of the gripes here are with companies being able to do this for profit. So why not make a NON-profit, that Universities could sponsor?
Make up a nice little agreement that states that the organization only has permission to store and use their works in order to compare to other works. I.e. no publication rights (noone else can see them), except as quotes to prove plageratism (which might be covered under fair use, but just to be on the safe side).
It is a real problem, and you know it. I've been a student assistant and there's been several blatant attempts at wholesale copying (Mostly Excel code, wouldn't have a clue about written assigments from past years). The prize winners were those that managed to deliver a spreadsheet where *every* cell was linked to the source they copied it from...
I literally told my professor, that I could fail quite many. But I got so many "perfect" solutions, I also told him that it wouldn't separate the cheaters from the non-cheaters - it'd separate the poor cheaters from the good cheaters. This was only pass/fail, not graded, must pass all. So they got to deliver it again. Mysteriously enough, a perfect solution identical to the original solution, released last year, appeared in no time.
The entire class did really poorly on the exams though, but I don't see how I could have done any different. They got the exact same assignments, so it was easy to cheat. Same with papers, if it's easy... Even if you rework it to your own, that's basicly what most of the other students do. It's almost as much job rewriting it well, as it is writing it on your own...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It annoys me when people deliberately make other people's jobs harder.
In my many years of experience in education, I have come across miserable people. Some of those miserable people were/are in a position of incredible power over the future of their students. To stick it to these people, in however small a way, is immensely satisfying - especially if you do it with their own asinine rules.
You will see a similar situation in prisons where inmates will use whatever techniques are at their disposal to make life difficult for their keepers.
Suffice it to say there probably was a reason for all the extra effort put into this "electronic copy". There are miserable people everywhere in this world, on both sides of the fence.
..don't panic
Many people on /. assume that any use of cheat checking is "guilty until proven innocent", but that is not necessarily the case. I am a computer science professor who submits all programs for comparison to all other students in the class to MOSS . The 300 programs means 90000 comparisons which are returned sorted on similarity. It would be foolish to simply acuse people based on that. I spend at least an hour on each case. I only use MOSS to do a first pass to eliminate the programs which I need not look at. Out of 90000 only the top dozen require checking. Any case I build against a student is the same as if I did it all by hand -- I simply have been saved the time of looking at the vast majority which are fine. Of course, the assumption is that there are no false negatives -- all that I DON'T look at are innocent. Many years of experience have convinced me that it is a reasonable assumption.
But my point is that the computer is not determining guilt; I am.
Briefly, the issue of the database of papers is quite a different issue and I agree with the sentiment that it is a problem. I do teach courses with essays and I can tell you that it is quite easy to find plagarism proof -- I can search the web as well as the students. Just last semester I read a paper, the alarms went off, I searched and found the sources, and failed the student.
People who have mentioned that the underlying issue is cutting costs, and that that is wrong are correct on both counts. In the US, financial support for education appears to be at a nadir.
For you guys that haven't used this system. You have to create a account and send your report in, and the teacher gets the report later on what you did. It doesn't tell you if it detected something wrong and give you the chance to fix it. You won't know until your teacher gets after you.
And while some teachers may do the leg work and double check the flagged report on there own, not all of them do. Some have little clue how it works and assume it's correct.
I get particularly fed up when instructors demand submissions in a certain format, like a proprietory word processor which will remain unnamed.
:)
Given that our school used to be 90% linux that seemed particularly unfair. Granted they did offer free Office licenses for students own computers but that doesn't help everyone.
I've been accused of plagurism, which I absolutely did not do, and had to drag the departmental heads into a meeting and fight my case. Automated checkers cause far too many problems. My work was clearly intercepted heading to the print queue and retyped into micrsoft word, complete with capital I as a loop variable
The point is that electronic submission should be secure, so that other people cant rip off your submission as it's been handed in. Lecturers should work on requiring GPG'd submissions to keep stuff safe.
.... I think this is plain disgusting. If this service turned up in Australia, I wouldn't turn in my work to them. In fact, I'd happily publish work (actual work written by myself, not stuff on worksheets etc.) on my own website and not to that utter waste of money database. One of my friends already has.
I was a TA for a C programming class just last semester. With all the programs I had to grade, it was unrealistic for me to be able to detect cheating without help. I submitted papers to the free-as-in-beer MOSS program at UC Berkeley. The system doesn't require students to hand assignments in through it and merely shows you the closest matches and lets you draw your own conclusions. It's an impressive piece of work and it doesn't make anyone any money by my use of it.
To my extreme dismay, the system brought up submissions by two students that grew progressively more similar as the semester progressed until it became obvious they were not original. Possibly the hardest thing I have ever done was to report these students to the professor. They admitted to it and both failed the class as a result. It still pains me to think that I had a part in causing them so much grief, but I still believe I did the right thing. If nothing is done to prevent this, it betrays the students who work hard to produce their own work. The value of a degree goes down as well as the integrity of the institution if anyone with money to buy assignments or skilled friends can do just as well as those who learn these skills on their own.
Still, I'm glad I got a research position this semester where I will not have to play such a disciplinary role.
Students cheat, that's a fact. You cheated at least once in your life, that's a very valid hypothesis. A professor checking the papers through the Turn-It-In is doing everything right, because today assuming the student is a cheater would be correct in >50% cases.
Moral of the story.
Use Turn-It-In.
Punish the cheaters.
and never trust your students.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Scanning and cataloging can work backwards too.
Unquoted student contributors are often fuel for the output of the professorship It's not only cut and pasted recycling of their already published material that fuels this crazy infolation.
I had quite a few ideas lifted by my doctoral supervisors, even the examiners. Sometimes they even took the words. I didn't mind it when they used the neologisms - which are designed to capture a concept in a word and are kind of copyrighted nuggets of insight - but whole lifted paragraphs got my goat(se) a little.
Just because they mark it and have to figure it out a bit doesn't mean they can steal it to fulfil the exponential demand for journal articles.
-rw-r--r--
DK
find it funny that we can have a long and detailed discussion of fair use, copyright and intellectual property on this subject, and also say 'fuck the RIAA I want to download music for free'?
It seems to me that not paying to get something you would otherwise have to pay for, and profiting from something you didn't pay for are mirror images.
This is not flamebait - the RIAA truly does suck and hurts artists, especially good ones.
They have forced drug testing in high levels...specifically anti-doping regulations in the olympics and world championships, world cups, etc. requrie winners to submit to drug tests or forgo medals.
Why dont we get the professors off their ass and stop them plagerising question/answers tests and make them do some work for a change :)
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
He rails on about accusing people of things before being proven, then he says that Republicans in general are like that, except maybe a couple, thereby indicting people who may be Republican of sins of a few, effectively convicting them of being Republican before being proven that they act in any sort of way.
What an idiot. He should take his own advice better.
Most universities and colleges equate essay writing in classes of 50 students with "higher education". Higher education for many students in their freshman year, means big lecture halls, large classes, and high tuition. Under these conditions, how can there be a critical engagement between a young scholar and a professor? Essay cheating is the end result of a system in which the only question that students ask is: "What do I have to do to get an A?"
So, they're arguing that their use of your paper isn't removing your ability to commercially exploit the use of your paper. Unless it was a paper on how to detect plagiarism, and you were planning to sell it to people or use it as a basis for a service of your own.
I wouldn't be so angry if it was, say, a non-profit service from a university. Still, I'd imagine that it's hard to argue before a court that, unless you were planning to use your paper in the same way they are, or they're distributing it, any damage has been done to you.
I may be completely off base, so don't kill me if I'm dead wrong, please. In fact, I'd like to know what laws would specifically refute their statement, since IANAL...
Danish != nationality
I haven't seen a single grading system that incorporates the factor "development" into it. Take the practice to take [weighted] averages from interim and final exams: if a student do not start out with a very good grade, odds are that, no matter how hard he studies afterwards, the excellent final grade will be muted by the poor initial one.
If we allow ourselves to continue on this rant, the conclusion is that copying "certified" work from others provides a better payoff in terms of academic records, i.e., grades and ranks. It works like a
"grade" insurance: The student has to cope with the risk of presenting somewhat original and untested work (from the point of view of the student himself) or showing up with something someone wrote before and already knows the result.
Worse, the risk of not being able to perform satisfactorily in the future is outweighed by the risk of coming out with bad grades -- instant gratification! the time value of grades (for those finance geeks around)!!!
To summarize:
I could say that the skills needed to learn are more important than the actual learning. The way your brain acquires and associates information is more important than the information itself. Information (courses) can be acquired, through a book or a lecture, but insight on how to acquire, store and make sense of information is never taught and usually has some metaphysical conotations in it.
And, yes, I post AC. So what?
Why, yes... and stolen code has been found in Linux before.
It would seem like someone would really fuck up the system by submitting works that included large sections quoted from famous works such as the bill of rights or the declaration of independance.
I wonder if they filter out stuff like that?
While generally paper mills are despised in academics, its is not uncommon to have one of my business partners ghost write white papers where I dictate the ideas and then they write up the papers. Often because I don't have the time and second of all, they are professional writers and write twice as well as I ever could. We quickly found out its faster if I set in front of a video camera or tape recorder what needs to be said and then have them write it in the first place rather than I write it up and then have them rewrite it because it sucked that bad.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Given that the article in question concerns a McGill student, I fail to see how quoting US copyright law is even remotely relevant.
I have a professor who uses the system and I careful licenced my paper before I submitted it. (And she couldn't deal with the PDF and never actually submitted it to the database anyway, and she just printed it and marked it. But then she knows I'd never, ever, cheat.)
Insanity is contagious. - Yossarian
Maybe you need to go back to high school a bit.
That's exactly it. The school pays money to the service. The service makes money. The papers that the students submit are in the database that the company uses to make money. Bottom line, student's work is being used by the company to make money and student is not compensated
As a college student, I couldn't be happier with my school using this. If you get away with plagiarizing a paper in school the following thing happen:
1.) If the course is graded on a curve (most are) you wind up brining down the grade of the rest of the class (assuming that you copied from a decent source)
2.) You waste the professor's time grading someone else's work
3.) You don't learn the material that would have if you wrote the paper-- you come out of school a with a little less knowledge
Cheating is probably the most anti-intellectual thing you can do. It has no place in any university. One does have to consider borderline cases and first offenses, and should give the student the benefit of the doubt. If I ran a school, anyone caught repeatedly cheating would be expelled and their names would be added to a page on the school's website.
That your university does NOT offer master's or PhD degrees.
How can I be so certain? Well, you need to (surprise!) re-use a lot of your earlier work ("self-plagarism")in your advanced degrees. You lay the foundation in the BS, extend it in the MS, and then develop a new twist in the PhD.
Hmm. Not that I'm picking on you (of course I am, stupid question), but NSA says GPG is not a great protection tool... Or maybe it was PGP *smirk*
Although it is sometimes frustrating to see other students getting an A for cheating, when you worked hard for and A- or something, this kind of thing makes me wary because:
1) If a class is structured properly, cheating isn't really much of a problem. It seems like most physics professors get this the best (I just graduated as a computer science major from UCI). They simply put all the emphasis on being able to DO the work. And they test this on the final & midterm exams. They even give you all the damn formulas most of the time, if their any good. And no whining about "it's different in other subjects". If it's a writing class, write an essay, two hours is usually available for the final exam, and even it it's only an hour, that's more time then they give on either the AP's or the GRE's, so it should be sufficient. If you can't come up with something in two hours, you don't know the material well enough. If it's a programming class, write out the code for a program on the test (this is actually quite a neat way of testing it, although most prof. bow to students unable to survive w/out a compiler). And if it's a engineering class, or a physics class, the teachers probably doing it right anyway. It's much easier to regulate people in a final exam then at home. If they want to copy all their homework, then they fail the exam, and if the hmk's only worth 10%, they'll get the grade they deserve (I mean cheating is harder then making zero effort, so maybe a F+ is deserved =P)
2)In the long run, even if you get that stellar GPA through cheating instead of working, all you'll end up with is a shitload of debt, when employers realize you don't know shit. You usually can't cheat your way through a job, except if your in marketing or something, and then that's your damn job anyway, and good for you if you learned how to do it well.Besides, most of the things I see people cheat on our *harder* subjects that you either will never need in the workplace, or simply can't bs your way through once your in the workplace. So it does catch up with you unless your a CEO, or in sales, and usually those jobs are gotten through the buddy system anyway, and there are bigger issues with that person then the fact they cheated on a paper.
With the best professors, cheating wasn't really much of a problem, because you simply couldn't find a way to cheat.
And don't be complaining about all the work you do if your a prof or something. Graders do all the damn grading, at least a UCI, TA's usually don't even do that much. And so I've seen my share of what works and doesn't (as grading papers paid my rent through college).
That's all for now
I would not trust graduates from that "university" to work for me. I feel sad to come from a country where this goes on. Perhaps the "standard" is too difficult, but I think that cheating on this scale is nearly as corrosive to learning as high rates of corruption in many countries is to economic growth.
In my university studies, I took pride in doing my work myself. I developed my ability to solve problems in a short time frame. I do not trust graduates who solve problems by copying to be able to solve real problems. Can they really write software?
However, I suggest that it makes more sense for the university to check assignments themselves, using their own resources. It can be a simple part of the assignment submission process. Then a refusal to submit to plagiarism checking is equivalent to refusing to submit an assignment, and is much easier to adjudicate. Outsourcing can be carried beyond reasonable limits.
Hasn't anyone realized that most institutions care more about our tuition money than our grades/performance? I mean, our GPA isnt on that $80,000 peice of paper is it?
Couldn't I just take out an $80,000 loan and trade that for a peice of paper that says I went to school for; but have no experience doing (insert area of study here)?
---Ponder it
It's not what you know; It's what you can find out.
I'm in college now and I certainly don't cut and paste from the internet to write my papers. That doesn't mean I don't use online sources (I can access a ridiculous number of journals and things like that through my university's library online) at all. People should still know how to research sources and then put the things they've learned into their own words. It's not that hard.
The only time I cut and paste for a paper is when I am making a direct quote, which will be formatted differently (either by actual quotation marks or by block-quoting). It's obvious when something like that is accidentally not attributed, so it's not as big of a deal.
You can kick anyone out of your place of business of course.
By opening a business you are generating an implied license of entry to them. Revoke it, and they are no longer permitted to enter.
Key point is you must explicity inform them of the change.
Student handbook agreements, sure they can have these, and they can kick them out. My point is unless I specifically and explicitly sign over my rights to them, I own my work.
Companies have lost ownership of employee inventions done on company time using company equipment. Companies have also (less frequently) gained rights to employee inventions done on the employees personal time.
It isn't very clear cut, I'm not a lawyer, and this is just my opinion, and my logic behind it.
The website seams overdone.
The student has to submit the paper. He has to sign in and digitally sign a contract with thies people just so they can verify the paper isn't plagerised.
Now you have a random website you don't nessisarly trust holding your paper e-mail address and so on. Exelent. Where did all this spam come from?
"Hello? Yes I wrote that but... No I don't work for.. How the hell did that get.. Thats my freaking paper."
If the professor trusts the organisation to be fair and honnest HE can submit the papers himself. Instead of forcing the students to.
Ferther more when there are false postives the student can discuss it with the professor or the professor can do his own fact checking.
Also a sliding scale can be used.
After all the whole point of this tool is to:
A. Protect a publisers intelectual property
B. Help professors check for plagerism.
Also you don't want the student involved in the process. After a while I'd expect a number of publishers to set up similare systems each for the same reason.
Each with a diffrent logic and a diffrent way of scanning the information. If the student knows what system is being used he can do the research to discover how to thwart it.
(I'm presume collage and universitys still provide students with vast resources for research including big fat internet pipes)
But if the plagerist dosen't know who the professor is relying on the plagerist won't be able to check for possable ways to thwart.
For now however I'd say the big fat back door is use books published by someone not participating in this project.
I don't actually exist.
I've read a lot crap about this in this discussion. One thing strikes me: if you look around at the outcomes of different lawsuits it somehow shines pretty bright that 'plagiarism' is not the only thing that has this kind of assumption attached. Simply put, if court and legal costs outweigh costs of a settlement, nobody cares if they are deemed guilty or innocent, they are gonna settle even if that means putting 'guilty' label on them.