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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."
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?
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.
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
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.
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FreeNET user? Comfortable with the adverse selection?
As a former university teacher, I've never used this turnitin site, but I did use a 30-line python script that would take random fragments of 10 consecutive words in the papers and would run them (a) through google and (b) against all other papers that were turned in. This worked awesomely well and saved me a lot of time that I could spend on actually assessing the quality of the non-fraudulent papers.
Plagiarism simply happens and I don't see the problem with automated checking for it. Automating tasks that formerly needed insight, training, and knowledge might be called the information revolution.
I disagree with your second statement. Two points, one a niggling one and another that is less so. a) The system doesn't work against paper mills because the output of a paper mill is new content, that's why it is a mill. b) Students have a decent arguement in saying that they own the material within a paper they write (an original one) and the fact that the system indexes their content if it is deemed legitimate (assuming there is no option to opt out) means the company is bolstering its product without due compensation. The papers i write are my property. They are given to a professor for a grade but even the professor does not have a right to show it as an example without my permission. Reproduction without prior consent, and due compensation, is listed in the cover of most (scientific) journals.
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.
The papers i write are my property.
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.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Students are subject to peer pressure. Everyone is subject to it. But if your classmate cheats, that doesn't mean that you will too. Granted, where one's view differs on this is dependant on one's belief/trust/faith in other humans.
I have nothing against the service itself. I have nothing against schools using it as a screening method to flag potentially problematic papers.
I have a problem with the institution making the students be the ones to submit their works to have it validated.
What does that teach a student? That they are not trusted. That their teachers have no faith in their character.
While this might catch a few cheaters, it stands a high chance of souring good students to do good work.
If a good student gets flagged, is that added to their record as a "risk factor"? How will that impact their academic and professional career?
Will there come a point where the service is trusted outright and positives aren't checked and students are penalized and/or expelled by default?
I agree, there is no easy solution which doesn't have a cost. Stuffing 100 students into a classroom is just wrong from a teaching standpoint. But so is subjecting students to a "academic cavity search".
I attended a state university and so know what you mean about 100 student classrooms. I currently attend a private university and pay quite a bit more. But there are only 15-20 students in the class and the learning quality is much much higher.
We depend so much on "services" that the higher ups think that "bodies" and "resources" like schools, classrooms, teachers, and books are expendable. That is WRONG.
I'm sorry to hear that you are burdened with so many students. However, burdening students' conscience with these screening services is the quick fix which will lead to a death spiral of educational quality.
It makes me sick to know that my children will have to go through this.
Winged Power Photography
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.
And I am a student. And you guys wouldn't believe the crap people try to force down our throaths. Persoanlly, among the worst atrocities college forced upon me is an essay about... *drumroll* THE EFFICIENT DISPOSAL OF ICT WASTE! *ba-dum CHING!* How's that for a class where 50% wants to become a developer, 25% network administrator and the other 25% always skips class? IF I had done that essay as expected it would have cost me quite a bit of time and every second I spent writing that essay would be one second too much, which pretty much everyone though. The end result? 12 nearly identical essays, while 12 others never were handed in. No one was interested, no one gave a damn and no one wrote one original bit.
Of course it's easy to blame student of being lazy. Tell you what, you make college worth my time AND money, I'll do your goddamn assignments.
Hate me!
It probably is a copyright thing. I am on a few testing committees with my university, and these apps have come up quite a bit -- we are actually under contract for one and I've bitched and moaned about it. I turned in a journal article I had cowritten in, and it came back as plagerized...I had the guys look into it, and as I *RARELY* use my own name on journal articles (its a little hard to get published when folks find out that while you are a noted name in the field, you don't have a Ph.D...and ya actually dropped out of school before ya got your bachellors because a research project got in your way of actually dealing with the piddly shit...and 10 years later, you are still working on the same research with a team of people under ya).
:-)...and apparently my employeer has modified their agreement with the company they are using to where the papers submitted still belong to the university, and that they are licensed to use the papers solely for papers within the university. Nothing is to be stored elsewhere or used for any other purposes. We don't get it for free and we pay quite a bit so they were willing to work within these bounds...as a employee of the university, I'm satisfied with that...if I turn in a paper as a student, I don't see how the university can be held accountable for using it elsewhere as long as I'm given credit for the paper, but if they were used for BFE-University -- I'd be mighty pissed (err...once again).
Turns out, they had *MY* article in the database...my copyright was assigned to the journal for that publication only. I retained all other publication rights. I even had to sign a waiver to allow the article to be published electronically because at the time the journal didn't have a site, and the publisher wanted to show case some new ideas.
The plagerizing company had no legitimate right to the copyright, but it was in there system in some form (I don't even care if it was tokenized down to line noise...it is essentially my works) and I bitched some people out about it.
I've heard a few of my friends had the same reaction (well, at least their names were attached to the papers...must be nice to have degrees and shit
So, if your university is doing this, make certain that your copyright stays within fair use only...adding your paper to the global database to help a corporation profit is NOT fairuse. Helping your university, the one you pay money to and support in various other ways, is -- IMHO -- fairusage.
blah
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I agree with the grandparent poster here, and I think most other posters are missing a valid point (one that I hear one the first day of nearly every class I have ever been in.)
It goes something like this:
"I will know if you cheat. I will catch you. I may miss it the first time, I may miss it the second time, but I will catch you. If you turn in one paper, and then in your second paper, the setence structure and word usage are completely different, I will know something is up. I keep all copies of all of your in class and out of class writing assignments, so it's easy to compare. I've been teaching here for X years, and I was once a student too, don't think I don't know all of the tricks."
Professors aren't idiots (and they have also been able to throw words and phrases into search engines for just as long as students have been able to find papers the same way.)
Even if you have one professor that doesn't catch you, the next one probably will.
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.
I'm in law school. Plagarism there is quite serious, although I seem to recall a prior /. discussion that Senator Biden apparently plagarized a report and seems none the worse for it.
Those professors of mine that have discussed it have this to say (about plagerism from court decisions, at least): It used to be hard to detect plagarism, but now it is easy. They say they can tell when a student has plagerized, as the writing is just too polished, so they go online and type in some text and often can find the match.
I just don't know why anyone would even attempt to copy in this way as you can always cite to something, and thus make it's use proper. Alternatively, just talk to the professor or get the zero - the alternative is risk of expulsion. I believe schools can even recind degrees they've awarded if evidence of wrongdoing comes up.
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.
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Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
Simply trusting the students is not a reasonable option. Schools have a reputation to uphold in the eyes of employers. If they start turning out graduates who claim to have taken a writing class but couldn't write a complete sentence to save their lives, employers will think twice before hiring their students in the future. That means students will not want to go there in the future, meaning fewer students and poorer quality students, leading to a never-ending spiral until eventually the university closes. I've seen universities go down that path, and it isn't pretty.
Those companies don't make money off your paper. They don't make a single penny more because your paper is on their servers. They make money because they provide an important service.
That having been said, doing this on final submission is the wrong way to solve the problem. The right way is to give the students the opportunity to revise the paper after such a submission and resubmit as often as desired. That way, they know they've been caught and can redeem themselves by doing the work themselves.
It also could provide a means for near real-time grammar and spelling advice, which is much a much better way to actually learn than simply getting back papers with red marks. If the purpose of teaching is to teach (rather than to simply deflate students' sense of self-worth as some teachers seem to believe :-| ), then this has a lot of potential....
Just my $0.02.
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This post is Copyright 2004 by Anthony DiPierro. Reproduction of any type without the express written permission of me is prohibited.
What's keeping students from putting a copyright notice on the front page of all their papers, with some boilerplate text
Absolutely nothing. However, just because you write something doesn't mean it's true. Can I sue slashdot for distributing this post?
If it works for Major League Baseball, why can't it work for a student?
Major League Baseball has lost a lot of its copyright fights. Specifically the whole "no description or account of this game" has been thrown out by courts. Doesn't stop them from saying it. But saying it doesn't make it true.
I took AP European History in High school. We had to write a ton of essays for that. I then went to college and took a couple more European History classes. Now, some of these college classes had essay assignments that were *exactly* like the ones I did in high school. Now, I did a good job on my high school essays, so I just turned some of those in. They were my original work, and I still knew the material good enough to re-write the essay if I had to.
Bam, second essay I turn in that I had written previously, I get called in. Turns out, my teacher thought that I had been plagarizing. He ran my papers through one of these databases, that my high school teacher had so conveniently submitted my papers to, and got a hit.
There was nothing I could do to convince my teacher I wasn't plagarizing. I was able to word for word recite passages and ideas out of my paper, from memory. Apparently that wasn't good enough. I almost lost two years of college education (plagarism annuls all the courses you have taken at this university) because of a stupid service like this one. Screw them. They aged me five years over worrying about whether re-submitting my own original work was going to ruin my future.
In other words, this is not full-proof and I pity the students who turn the same paper into more than one class, because you may just get screwed.