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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."
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
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.
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
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."