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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."
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?
Since when did plagiarising become learning? Learning is taking existing material and working on it to produce new thought, ideas and interpretations.
Sure, you can have long explicit quotes but you must mark them as such. If the anti-cheating detectors flags you for such a paragraph, there's no problem if I can see that you've actually contributed to the report. If there's a real problem with the material, I will still give you a chance to explain yourself to me. I don't see what's the problem here. There are plenty of safeguards in place - no-one gets rejected because "an algorithm said the work is a copy".
We have a problem with otherwise underachiving students turning in word-for-word copies of old high-grade reports. The clever ones will try to modify the wording slightly, change the layout or the figures to confuse the examiners. Bayesian filters will still flag those.
The owls are not what they seem
I've had to turn papers into turnitin.com before. You do get a score, but it specifically points out the parts that were copied, along with their source. Teachers _have_ to check it, because it will count quoted passages as plagiarism.
Except that when you enroll, the first thing they have you sign is to hand-over that copyright and resign of the right of making any future possible claims.
/. Where the truth
Have you actually any idea what the probabilities are of someone writing the exact same sentence for describing the same thing? Just take this particular post apart and feed ten consecutive words through google and see how many hits you get.
Also, take a fairly generic sentence such as "to improve writing and research skills, encourage collaborative online learning" and try to find out where I got it from.
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.
As for my university, Dalhousie,which makes use of turnitin.com, there are 3 main possibilities with some other less common considerations. First a zero on the paper, which is damn near guaranteed. The second is failure in the course. Thirdly, and the most severe is explusion from the university.
Even if a student was to "get through" the university states that at any given time they may REVOKE the students DEGREE if they are found to have plagarized!
The process is really quite disgusting and strenuous on both profs and students. First, suspected cases have to be turned into the Senate Discipline Committee, which then sets up a hearing and at some point summons you to this hearing.
I can tell you from experience, that many of my professors dread the process and truly hate turnitin.com. They would much rather catch the plagarism themselves and deal with it in their own way. However, the profs career is even at risk if they don't follow university policy and submit to this discipline commitee.
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.
Lastly, although I haven't plagarized, my friend came really close to undergoing this process. He passed in a history essay, and it was also submitted it to turnitin.com, the result was a bunch of flagged sections. Upon closer observation and discussion with the professor, it turned out that the material was all properly cited. Instead the stupid turnitin.com program/process said the sentence structure was close to other sentences in hundreds of other essays. For example, imagine going to a magazine, and flipping through 45 pages looking for the sentence "The cat is hungry" by piecing together the words for that sentence by grabbing these words over all of the 45 pages in the magazine. Remember that simpsons episode where Homers mom came back (this season I believe) and he got the message from reading the news paper.
Maybe this is why the profs don't like it. All I know is that it has created a really negative atmosphere in the university, that coupled with my $7000 tution sometimes makes me wonder why I pay for this pain.
You guys can check out our discipline thingy here
PLAGARISM The best part is the self-plagarism policy!
HAHA Injured Hippies
At most universities here in Canada, if you are caught cheating on an essay, the minimum punishment is usually an F in the class. For repeat offenders, or more senior students (people who should know better than the ones who are fresh out of high school) the punishment can be more severe, and may include expulsion. If you are caught cheating, or even caught with an appeared intention to cheat on a final exam, you are usually expelled from the school. In which case you can kiss your academic career good-bye because no other school will ever accept you.
That's kind of unfair considering with most first-year assignments if they DIDN'T look similar then the student probably did the assignment wrong. At least most of our first year programming assignments were very simple things and we were expected to use similar structures to the concepts we learned in class to accomplish it. As a result, I would be amazed if your little cheating detector didn't pick out 90% of the class as copying off of each other. It's not because we were cheating, we were following the professor's mandated coding style.
I'm afriad trust went out the window about the 50th time someone tried to pass someone else's work off as their own in one of my assignments.
o tter/, its roughly the equivelent of reading Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights almost 4 times and not much less that reading the entire Old Testment of the Bible.
OK lets do some maths here...at the university at which I am a lecturer the average academic has 12 teaching contact hours a week (research, administration, student consultation etc are additional to this). Lets assume that lecturer gives 2 lecturers per week (4 hours). Lets knock a couple of hours off for unit coordination, or other time allowances etc and say that the staff member has 6 1 hour tutorials. Each tutorial has 30 students. That means there are 6x30 (180) potential assignments. Lets call it 150 since some students might not submit assignments for various reasons or they may have extensions and submit the assignment later. Lets say the assignment is a 3000 word report. That means that the staff member has to read 450,000 words, not including direct quotes, appendices etc that are not included in word counts. Just to put that into perspective, according to http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/books/01/15/new.p
Lets say that it takes 1/2 hour to mark a report that does not have any plagiarism issues. That means that 75 hours will be spent marking these assignments alone (assuming non-stop marking with no breaks). According to various decision makers in the university, assignments need to be returned to students in 2 weeks (Try reading the Old Testment of the Bible in 2 weeks). This means that in addition to normal hours the lecturer has to find an extra 75 hours over 2 weeks. When we detect plagiarism in a report, we are usually very thorough in its investigation so that if it comes to an appeal, the Is are dotted and the Ts are crossed. This can easily take 2-3 hours per plagiarised assignment (not including time spent later interviewing the student).
This means the staff member has a few options;
1) pretend the plagiarism doesn't exist. However this has the effect of devaluing the univeristy's degrees as employers are wary about employing gradutes when they've had a bad experience in the past. The reputation of a University can be very important and easily lost.
2) Reduce the time spent with dealing with plagiarised assignments through automated plagiarism detection tools. This does not eliminate the time spent on the problem. We never rely solely on the output of an automated tool, beacuse we understand that they generate false positives. However it does take some of the leg work out of it.
3) Spend less time assessing the assignments from students that have done the right thing and done the assignment without plagiarising. In my opinion this is not a good option. I belive that we need to protect the students that do the right thing.
4) Not meet the deadline. Not the best career move.
So no, I don't think it is the job of a lecturer top check for plagiarism. It is something that I shouldn't have to do. When students submit an assignment they sign a cover page which states that any non-original material has been appropriately acknowledged.
Having said all of this, personally I'm not a fan of web based plagairism detection services. I would much rather have a local tool that can check submitted assignments against themselves and a search engine, so that the University maintains control of the assignments.
I live in Montreal and attend Concordia, so I've heard quite a bit about this case. There were two main principles at issue here:
1 - The fact that students were presumed guilty until proven innocent (ie: ALL students were treated as plagiarists and had to prove otherwise or get zero).
and (and this is a biggie)
2 - Copies of the student's work submitted to the service were kept and included into its database...students had no say in the future use of their work, they either had to give up rights to it in favor of the service (so they could add it to their database and use it to make money) or refuse, not use the service and get zero.
As near as I can tell the student, nor any of the people supporting him, had no problem with using the service as a tool...only to the conditions of using it and the fact that it was used before any suspicion of plagiarism existed.
"I'm not a procrastinator, I'm temporally challenged"
US copyright law specifically does this. However, it is up to the copyright holder to defend the copyright. The law is on the side of the copyright holder, and court costs can be included, I believe. However, finding a lawyer willing to defend your copyright could prove difficult, unless your paper has some sort of value to someoene other than you. Remember, many people write music and novels. Not too many people make a living writing and publishing "unknown" talent, so proving damage would be difficult if not impossible. Most copyright infringement cases deal with the infringement after the copied work makes millions of dollars.
Value of intelectual property, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder!
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
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
Please specify what institutions you're talking about, in what country, and at least one piece of evidence that this is an official policy -- because I don't believe it.
I teach in Massachusetts and talk to many teachers at a number of institutions. For example, we certainly own all our lecture notes (the union would go ballistic if that wasn't the case, the only thing the school has a right to even see is our syllabus). I've never heard of students not owning the papers they write in class, anywhere.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
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
Whoa there dude have you ever been in academia let alone worked in it? The precept of ALL academic ventures is IP. Professors, and Universities, are very, very careful in maintaining their IP rights. That's why you have to cite :). If it were in the open domain then it wouldn't make a difference.
Compound this with the fact that as a student, you are PAYING for the privlege of being their. You maintain the rights to all of your assignments unless you explicitly assign those rights over to the University.
Grad students are different - they're running on the Uni's dole, but as an undergrad, you keep your IP rights.
I'm unaware of any prohibition of the schools making a students work public
It's called copyright law.
The college takes on the roll of an employer here, and has full rights to whatever you produce.
Unless you have a stipend or work/study arrangement you are a customer of the university, not an employee.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You're assumeing that the result of the plagiarism check is a simple "plagiarized" or "original" answer. But it isn't. Of course turn-it-in will document the sources from which a plagiarized paper is copied. And of course the prof will check whether the paper and the source are similar enough to constitute plagiarism. Every university I've been at required both the student's paper and the papers from which s/he copied as docmentation of a plagiarism case.
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.
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
turnitin has a pretty interesting analysis of whether they infringe on the copyright of the student who submit the papers.
Why would anyone be offended by you caring if students cheat. Unless you meant you don't care, in which case you should have said, "I couldn't care less." (Don't feel bad, it seems about 50% of people get this saying wrong.)
I doubt anybody will read this but in your case
might I recommend requiring students to hand in
sources and rough drafts of the papers? In
my writing classes, this was required (all 3 of them).
This pretty much shows the prof that I actually
did the writing on the papers. If a person only
handed in a final draft and shows no rough drafts,
its safe to assume the person copied it from somewhere.
Yes, we are also required to hand in rough drafts
and mark them up. Its not a lot of work to do either.