Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.
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:)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
If the intent is to protect against cheaters, then the teachers should submit the papers to the service for verification. The student should not have to be the one who is being required to turn in their papers to a service.
It is a matter of being treated like a criminal first.
The other problem would be false positives when people write with similar styles in two different parts of the nation/world. Given enough "samples" in their filter, the accuracey drops because you now have a much higher likelihood of turning up a match.
I Agree that plagiarizing work is wrong. But I do not agree that everyone should be treated like a cheater just because some in the student body are.
Winged Power Photography
That's exactly why automated plagiarism checks make sense: If it's similar enough to be flagged by a text comparison program, then you're not showing that you learned something, just that you know CTRL-C CTRL-V. You're not expected to come up with the next uncertainty principle, but being able to explain something in your own words is a requirement, because it shows a) that you understood it and b) that you can give structure to complex thoughts. The latter will be very helpful should you ever have an original thought of your own.
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?
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.
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.
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
Speaking as a student, the intent is to give the professor whatever they want with the least amount of effort. I personally couldn't care less about some of the subjects we're forced to take as part of our general education requirements, but before I can get a degree I need to satisfy them. I am ONLY interested in getting the fucking piece of paper so I can get on with my life.
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.
But you are right, once everybody starts submitting silly reports to services, the system will flood and EVERYBODY WILL BE PLAGIRIZING! A good student response would be to collect older papers [like the professor's school papers!] and submit them to services as well...let's see if any of the "pushers" of the system are guilty too! For a matter of fact that should be a new requirement to keep tenure...all profs entire body of work [pre-K to PHD] should be submitted to these services...and if they can't pass....
I think if you are found copying non-trivial sections of another work without crediting it then you ought to learn quickly how to defend yourself.
Also for masters and PhD programs you have to routinely defend your work as a matter of course.
Sure if the student has a disability they should have some other course [say, appeal in writing, have a spec.ed councellor, etc...]
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I don't dismiss anyone's work as plagiarised unless I can prove it. If I can prove, there's really not much you can do about it no matter how skilled a verbal acrobat you are.
The point of the whole exercise is to confront the student, make it clear that as far as I can see his work is plagiarised and that I can prove it to the disciplinary board if necessary. He will fail the course this year, but has two options in the future: 1) he can take the course again next year with no prejudice from my part; the disciplinary board will not be informed of the incident, 2) he can take me and my evidence to the board right now and let them decide.
The owls are not what they seem
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."
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...
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.
"So are you proposing that I shouldn't check for plagiarism because some people might be falsely accused and might not be able to defend themselves?" "I don't dismiss anyone's work as plagiarised unless I can prove it. If I can prove, there's really not much you can do about it no matter how skilled a verbal acrobat you are." -- Here you say that _you_ dont qualify the work as plagarism unless you can _prove_ it. That is quite a high standard. Others I have seen do not follow your high moral standards as I have seen myself. As you know, It is oft difficult to prove a negative assertion. It is far less difficult to prove someone cheated than to prove you did not! When papers contain many matching paragraphs, it is pretty cut and dried. That is not what I am addressing. Those arguing in favor of these methods overlook the possibility that a probability scale exists. If you will note, UCB did not feel this program was appropriate to use at their own university.
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.
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.
Speaking as an alum, the peice of paper hanging on my wall carries with it the prestige and reputation of the University I attended. That prestige is derived from the quality of students that university graduates, and in my case, the broad knoledge base graduates demonstrate. That broad knoledge base is in large part a result of those Gen Ed Requirements you speak so poorly of.
When students cheat and dodge assignments, they diminish the intelectual level of graduates my University produces. They also diminish the moral character of the pool of graduates. In short, my degree is rendered less valuable by the actions of students years down the road who are too short signted to appreciate the benefits of an education.
I don't think it's right to force the students to submit their papers to an automated system to check for plagirism themselves, it just seems rude. I do think students should be required to submit electronic versions of their papers to professors at all times, and that the professors should be strongly encouraged to use electronic tests for plagerism.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
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...
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.
.. fail. They either end up on academic probation and clean up their act, or I simply don't see them again..
I'm currently enrolled in second year undergraduate studies at a major Canadian University.. I'm taking a BEng in Computer Engineering. And let me tell you, it IS a period of hardship and disconnection from my old life.. Especially during February and October, I don't go out, at all.. By the time I make it home at night I barely have enough left in me to turn the monitor on and refresh slashdot.
I have lots of friends in the arts, and I've taken some English and Philosophy courses to try to broad my horizons, and it's pretty much the same there. They have inhuman ammounts of reading to do (they seem to read 12 hours a day, every day), as each 13 week course seems to require at least 5 books be read, understood, and you have to be able to compare and contrast all 5 against one another.
Granted, there a lot of partying does go on, but those people
The biggest problem that I'm encoutering is that Undergrads are definitely a least-priority for my university. We get classes in the crappy temporary buildings (double cohart year anyone? whoever thought OAC was a bad idea needs to be shot, OAC _was_ highschool for me, it's where I learned to actually work!). We also get the crappiest timeslots (a class at 8:30am.. followed by a class at 5:30pm, ugh). Oh, and lots of TAs (and profs for that matter) have trouble communicating in English. Maybe if I was of asian or middle eastern descent I'd have less trouble.. but alas, I'm a member of the new minority, white folks.
DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!
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
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.
Ah, so it is just like this CAPS II bullshit actually makes it easier for terrorists to get on airplanes because they now have the chance to do test runs until they find people who can pass the system without extra scrutiny.
Since the student is submitting to the plagarism detector himself, he can plagarize, then tweak then test and if it fails the test, he can tweak it some more until eventually it passes the plagarism test. Since he now has the official stamp of approval from the infallible computer - there is no need for a human to check for plagarism.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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
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.
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.
How proud you are! You were able to deliberately make someone's life more difficult, and I'm sure you bragged about it to your friends, and they smiled and told you how "cool" you were that you made things tougher on a grown-up.
A professor has a certain amount of time, and many professional duties. Scholarship, teaching, and service. By asking you to submit things electronically, the professor was hoping to spend more time doing what you are paying him for, reading your work carefully. But yes, by finding a loophole, you were able to take his time away from grading the smart kids' papers so he could read your smartass paper.
And now you brag about it in slashdot. Someday you may be an adult in a position where you are asking for results from somebody, and I hope you don't have to deal with "You didn't say they couldn't be in base 8" "You didn't say they had to be in English" "You didn't say I couldn't smear excrement on them first"
It annoys me when people deliberately make other people's jobs harder.
God is real unless declared integer
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.
Full time grad students in tech fields are PAID to go to school. So your works literally are "works for hire".
The fact that the prof gets rights over the university is between U Illinois and their faculty. It's likely part compensation for the fact that most of them could go into industry and make double their academic salary.
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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.
Rest assured, every conscientious instructor will compare your paper with perhaps similar passages in the textbook or widely available other sorces, s/he wil put "suspicious" phrases through google, and will keep an eye out for similarities between your paper and that of other students. Does this make you feel like a criminal, too? Do they check ID's at exams at Western? Does that mae you feel like a criminal?
Remember that many universities policies require instructors to be vigilant in preventing and detecting academic dishonesty.
If I personally had to submit the papers and I was fully aware of the process, I would have ensured every source was cited.
That's something you should do anyway.
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.
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.
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.
One of the problems with using google is the student themselves can put their paper fragments on the net either to mask other searches or to wind up the lecturer, or even to drop the university into a nice juicy lawsuit so they can get a degree, their fees paid and a bonus.
You actually need snapshots from before the paper existed to do anything meaningful.
The second problem is that lots of little businesses sell people guaranteed *new* papers.
There are things that can be done more constructively to deal with such problems, and at least verify the student knows some of the subject - one of the most obvious being to randomly pick a few students each submission and invite them to a 30 minute defence of their essay.
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.
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.
Is learning a competitive contest?
Learning isn't, but school is. Especially grad school and upper division undergrad. Cheaters in a class artifically inflate the curve. This is one of the reasons that I don't like school. The very fact that plagiarism is possible annoys me. I would rather be creating something original that couldn't be plagarised even if I wanted to.
You can argue that grades don't matter much in the real world, but I have at least one counter example. Two people I know both graduated with engineering degrees at the same time. They both had 2 internships in their field (one in common) and did the same extracurricular activities. The main difference was in their GPAs.
One couldn't find a job by graduation time so he went to grad school for 2 years at a research assistant's salary. The other chose his dream job from multiple offers and went to work a month after graduation, taking grad school classes at night with his company paying for tuition. When the first finally finished grad school, it took him another 6 months to find a job he loves, and he still makes 10 thousand a year less than the other even though he has a Master's degree and the second guy is still slowly working on his.
In a better economy, the disparity may not have been so evident, but the bottom line is one guy has more home equity, more savings, less debt, and a few more fun vacations under his belt all because of less than 1 point difference in GPA. It will take the other guy quite a while to catch up.
Now, I agree that if the guy with better grades had cheated to get them, the other guy would catch up a lot quicker when job performance is what mattered most. But it would have still hurt him in the short term. Cheaters may not be hurting anyone but themselves in high school, but they can affect you financially after college.
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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.
Have you actually any idea what the probabilities are of someone writing the exact same sentence for describing the same thing?
It's a relative thing.
If you're checking for word-for-word plagarism, which a lot of plagarism is and is worth checking, you're right that the odds of a false positive is fairly low as long as you're checking for long enough phrases.
The bad part comes when you say, "Well, the students have figured out how to re-phrase the ideas so the word-for-word checker doesn't work so well. Let's abstract the concepts out and check for those."
Then you start getting into false positive land. The crazier the students get, the looser your concept matches get, the greater the chances of a false positive.
It's a trade-off, and as is often the case, no machine learning technique can really stand up to a determined human attacker's attempt to get an arbitrarily-choosable piece of data misclassified. Eventually the human forces the machine learning algorithm to be so loose it's impossible for the algorithm to really "say" anything about a given input. That's when you get false positives.
It's a tradeoff, and with human attackers, the machines inevitably lose. That's one reason these things are only useful for tools; the professor must not trust these above their own judgement.